People

Erin Stewart Mauldin

John Hope Franklin Chair of Southern History

Associate Professor

CONTACT Information and CV

Office: SNL 100
Phone: (727) 873-4156
Email: emauldin@usf.edu
Website
Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2014

TEACHING

My goal as an educator is to advance students’ understanding from the misconception of history as a series of “facts” or dates to be memorized and regurgitated to the realization that history is a question-driven enterprise--in other words, I want students to consider not just what we know about history, but how we know it. I use a variety of interactive and field-based learning strategies, and all my courses reflect the interdisciplinarity of my research. I teach courses on the 19th and 20th century U.S., both global and U.S. environmental history, military history, and food history, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of race, place, and issues of social and economic justice. I also occasionally teach our Methods and Materials classes, the U.S. History surveys, and graduate seminars.

RESEARCH

Interdisciplinarity forms the methodological underpinning of my work, and I borrow heavily from the natural sciences, geography, and environmental sociology to reframe the big questions of nineteenth-century southern history: slavery as capitalism, the impacts of the Civil War and emancipation on southern agriculture, economic stagnation in the shadow of “King Cotton,” and, more recently, the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization. My book, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It was awarded the 2019 Wiley-Silver Book Prize and CHOICE magazine designated it an Outstanding Academic Title. I am also the co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Global Environmental History (2012), and have published work in The Journal of the Civil War Era, The Alabama Review, and in the forthcoming volumes, The Oxford Handbook on Reconstruction, Battlefields and Homefronts, and Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. My next book project, tentatively titled, The First White Flight, investigates the role of industrial pollution in racially segregating urban areas of the New South.

I am also the Co-Editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series (University of Georgia Press).