Catherine McNeur | |
|---|---|
 Catherine McNeur, historian | |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Yale University New York University |
| Doctoral advisor | John Mack Faragher |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Environmental history |
| Institutions | Portland State University |
Catherine McNeur is a professor of history at Portland State University. [1] An environmental historian,she has focused on the nineteenth-century United States,urban public spaces,and the history of science. [2]
McNeur,who grew up in Glen Head,NY and attended North Shore High School,majored in Urban Design and Architecture Studies at New York University with minors in Political Science and Metropolitan Studies,graduating with honors in 2003. She earned her Master of Arts (2006),Master of Philosophy (2008),and Doctor of Philosophy (2012) degrees in history from Yale University studying with John Mack Faragher,Joanne Freeman,and David W. Blight. [3] Her dissertation,"The Swinish Multitude and Fashionable Promenades" won Yale University's John Addison Porter Prize,the Urban History Association's Award for Best Dissertation,and the American Society for Environmental History's Rachel Carson Prize. [4] [5] [6]
After a Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society and the New School,McNeur became an assistant professor at Portland State University in 2013,earning tenure in 2017. [7]
McNeur published her first book,Taming Manhattan:Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard University Press,2014),an environmental history of New York in the early nineteenth century that looked at the ways social unrest and urbanization were entangled in environmental issues from the unequal distribution of parks to pigs running freely on the streets. [8] The book was well received and won book prizes from the American Society for Environmental History,the New York Society Library,the Victorian Society of New York,and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
In 2023,McNeur published her second book,Mischievous Creatures:The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books,2023) having uncovered the lives of the entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris while researching a different project. [14] The book is not only a double biography of the sisters and their work,but also a rumination on why authors keep stumbling over hidden figures. [15] [16] [17] [18] McNeur has taught courses at Portland State University on writing biographies of marginalized scientists for Wikipedia,partnering with WikiEDU. [19]
Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland,Oregon,United States. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the next 20 years and was granted university status in 1969. It is one of two public universities in Oregon that are in a large city. It is governed by a board of trustees. PSU is classified among "R2:Doctoral Universities –High research activity".
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career,Robinson has received numerous awards,including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005,National Humanities Medal in 2012,and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016,Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Ian L. McHarg was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. McHarg was one of the most influential persons in the environmental movement who brought environmental concerns into broad public awareness and ecological planning methods into the mainstream of landscape architecture,city planning and public policy. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning. In this book,he set forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in geographic information systems.
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015,he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history,American political history,housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism,on housing and real estate,on poverty and public policy,on civil rights,and on the history of affirmative action.
Harriet Ritvo is an American historian who specializes in British history,particularly environmental history and the history of natural history. Ritvo is the Arthur J. Connor Professor of History at MIT and a member of the Program in Science,Technology and Society,and she was the head of MIT's History Faculty from 1999-2006.
The American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) is a professional society for the field of environmental history. The ASEH was founded in 1977 and its mission is to increase understanding of current environmental issues by analyzing their historical background. The ASEH promotes scholarship and teaching in environmental history,supports the professional needs of its members,and connects their work with larger communities. The organization's goals are to expand the understanding of the history of human interaction with the natural world,to foster dialogue with multiple disciplines and the public,and to support global environmental history that benefits the public and scholarly communities.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s,helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement,and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry:Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching;Like a Family:The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Sisters and Rebels:The Struggle for the Soul of America.
John Addison Porter was an American journalist,and the first person to hold the position of "Secretary to the President". He was born in New Haven,Connecticut,and died in Pomfret,Connecticut.
Catherine Chung is an American writer whose first novel,Forgotten Country,received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award,and was an Indie Next Pick,in addition to being chosen for several best of lists including Booklist's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2012,and the San Francisco Chronicle's and Bookpage's Best Books of 2012. She received a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing,and was recognized in 2010 by Granta magazine as one of its "New Voices" of the year. Her second book The Tenth Muse was released to critical acclaim,and was a 2019 Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. In 2015 Buzzfeed named her one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.
Heejun Chang is a professor of geography and associate dean for research and graduate programs at Portland State University.
Colin Strohn Woodard is an American journalist and writer known for his books American Nations:A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011),The Republic of Pirates (2007),and The Lobster Coast(2004),a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine.
Plutopia:Nuclear Families,Atomic Cities,and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters is a 2013 book by American environmental historian Kate Brown. The book is a comparative history of the cities of Richland,in the northwest United States adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site plutonium production area,and Ozersk,in Russia's southern Ural mountain region. These two cities were home to the world's first plutonium production sites,and in Plutopia Brown charts the environmental and social impacts of those sites on the residents of and the environment surrounding the two cities. Brown argues that the demands of plutonium production –both the danger of the physical process and the secrecy required in the Cold War context –led both US and Soviet officials to create "Plutopias," ideal communities to placate resident families in exchange for their cooperation and control over their bodies. This entailed creating significant state-run welfare programs along with high levels of consumerism in both places. However,each city witnessed what Brown terms "slow-motion disasters" via the slow,and usually controlled,release of high levels of radiation into their surrounding environments.
Margaretta Hare Morris was an American entomologist. Morris and the astronomer Maria Mitchell were the first women elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. She was also the second woman elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1859,after Lucy Say.
Nancy Langston is an American environmental historian,currently working as a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. She was the President of the American Society of Environmental History from 2007 to 2009. Her initial research on the historical and spatial migrations of toxic contaminants within the Lake Superior basin was supported by the National Science Foundation,and has informed her most recent publication titled Toxic Bodies. Langston is a Marshall Scholar.
Carl Abbott is an American historian and urbanist,specialising in the related fields of urban history,western American history,urban planning,and science fiction,and is a frequent speaker to local community groups.
Victoria Johnson is an American author and historian. She is a Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College.
Nancy C. Unger is an American history professor and author. She chairs the history department at Santa Clara University. She has written books on American women in the environmental movement,Bob La Follette,and Belle La Follette.
Elizabeth Carrington Morris was an American botanist who studied the flora of Philadelphia. With her sister,Margaretta Morris,she has been credited by historian Catherine McNeur as helping to transform American science in the 19th century.
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