Karl Jacoby
Professor of History:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 3009
Karl_Jacoby@Brown.EDU
Environmental history, Native American history, U.S. West, U.S.-Mexico borderlands
Biography
Karl Jacoby received his A.B. in 1987 from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in American history in 1997 from Yale University. After a year as a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College, he returned to Brown as an assistant professor of history in 1999. He was promoted to an associate professor with tenure in 2003 and to full professor in 2009.
Interests
Put broadly, my research centers on the roles human and non-human actors have played in shaping the past. I am particularly interested in understanding how relations of power within human society are reinforced, complicated, and, at times, effaced through interactions with the natural world. I have found the history of U.S. expansion an especially fertile area to explore such issues. My first book examined the ways in which the U.S. sought, through the conservation movement, to exert new forms of control over nature. My second project focused on the ways in which the tremendous violence towards American Indians that accompanied the "frontier" has been remembered and forgotten in the intervening years.
Degrees
Ph.D.
Awards
Beveridge Award, AHA, 2009
Wheeler-Voeglin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory, 2009
Special Distinction, Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 2009
Salomon Research Grant, Brown University, 2006
Faculty Fellowship, ACLS, 2005
Pembroke Center Faculty Fellow, Brown University, 2005
Littleton-Griswold Prize in Legal History, AHA, 2002
George Perkins Marsh Prize in Environmnetal History, ASEH, 2002
NEH Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2001
William McLoughlin Teaching Prize, Brown University, 2001
Ralph Hidy Award, Forest History Society, 1998
John Addison Porter Dissertation Prize, Yale University, 1998
Frederick W. Beinecke Dissertation Prize, Yale University, 1997
George Washington Egleston Dissertation Prize, Yale University, 1997
Affiliations
Board of Editors, The Encyclopedia of American Environmental History
American Society for Environmental History
Western History Association
American Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
Teaching
Environmental History, Native American History, Borderlands and Western U.S. History
Funded Research
Salomon Research Grant, Brown University, 2006, $6,700
American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship, 2005-6, $40,000.
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2001-2, $35,000.
