Contributors
- Contributors
Anne E. C. McCants is Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and director of the Concourse Freshmen Learning Community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches European economic and social history and social science research methods. She is author of Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (1997) and numerous articles on historical demography, material culture, and the standard of living in the Dutch Republic. She is currently working on an economic and institutional history of the movement to build cathedrals and other major churches in the Gothic style in northwestern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
J. R. McNeill is University Professor at Georgetown University. His latest books are Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000); The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (2003), coauthored with his father, William McNeill; and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010). In 2010 McNeill was awarded the Toynbee Prize for "academic and public contributions to humanity." He was president of the American Society for Environmental History (2011-13) and is a vice president of the American Historical Association (2012-15).
Peter C. Perdue is professor of history at Yale University. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. His first book, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 (1987), examines long-term agricultural change in one Chinese province. His book China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005) discusses environmental change, ethnicity, long-term economic change, and military conquest in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian contention over Siberia and central Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is coeditor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations (2007), with Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, and Shared Histories of Modernity [End Page 423] (2008), with Huri İslamoğlu-İnan. He is beginning a new project of comparative research on Chinese frontiers.
Joachim Radkau is emeritus professor of history at Bielefeld University. He has a reputation, he says with a smile, of holding a record for jumping topics. Having begun his scholarly career with a dissertation on German émigrés to the United States after 1933 ("Die deutsche Emigration in den USA: Ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Europapolitik 1933-1945" [1971]), he moved on to a variety of subjects: a jointly authored book with George W. F. Hallgarten, German Industry and Politics from Bismarck to the Present (1974); a history of nuclear technology, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (1983); research on forest history, Wood: A History (2012; originally published with Ingrid Schäfer as Holz: Ein Naturstoff in der Technikgeschichte [1987]); a history of technology in Germany, Technik in Deutschland: Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1989; new edition 2009); an investigation of psychohistory on anxiety from Otto von Bismarck to Adolf Hitler, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (1998); and Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (2008; originally published as Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt [2000]). Max Weber: A Biography was published in translation in 2011, and his new book, The Era of Ecology (Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte [2011]), is forthcoming in English.
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches environmental history, British history, and the history of natural history, and she is past president of the American Society for Environmental History. Her books include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997), The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (2010).
Robert M. Schwartz is E. Nevius Rodman Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches several courses in environmental history. His comparative research on railways, agriculture, and uneven development in Britain and France includes "Rail Transport, Agrarian Crisis, and the Restructuring of Agriculture: France and Great Britain Confront Globalization, [End Page 424] 1860-1900...
