It is with great pleasure that IPRH announces that Professor Bob Morrissey (History) will be the Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities. Professor Morrissey's fellowship term will begin in the Fall of 2017 and extend through 2020.

A native of Oak Park, IL, Bob Morrissey is Associate Professor of History, Helen Corley Petit Scholar (2016–17), and Conrad Humanities Scholar (2016–2021) at U of I. A specialist on early American history, his scholarship has focused on the relationship of people and non-human nature in the early modern period, and particularly in the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley regions of North America. In his current projects, he explores how the special ecological transition zone of the mid-continent—the former tallgrass prairie peninsula which covered much of Illinois, Iowa, Southern Minnesota and Wisconsin—shaped a dynamic and often overlooked human history between the fall of Cahokia and the arrival of the steel plows that utterly transformed the tallgrass in the mid-19th century. A major premise of this project is that the middle of North America was one of the most important ecological and cultural borderlands of early America. In a larger sense, Morrissey’s intellectual projects have explored the important role of the North American heartland in environmental history and thought. Bob has published work widely in journals such as Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, Environment and History, and Early American Studies. His book,Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country, is available from University of Pennsylvania Press.

As the Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Professor Morrissey will serve as the primary supervisor for the Environmental Humanities Research Group. He will serve as a mentor for the post-doctoral fellows, pre-doctoral fellows, and undergraduate interns, and as the leader for the research group’s initiatives, which will include a curriculum development for an undergraduate certificate program in Environmental Humanities.

To learn more about the IPRH-Mellon Fellowships, please visit the IPRH website.

Please join IPRH in offering our congratulations to Professor Morrissey!