Gregory T. Cushman is Associate Professor of International Environmental History at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses on Latin America, science and technology studies, and the global environment, often in close collaboration with other faculty in the environmental sciences and humanities. His first book Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge University Press, 2013) received the Turku Book Prize from the European Society of Environmental History and the RCC, the inaugural Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association. He has published a number of articles on climate history and the history of climate science, and several of his students were core participants in an NSF-funded IGERT program on the human dimensions of climate change. The environmental engagement of indigenous peoples in the Andean and Pacific worlds is another important focus of his work, particularly their interaction with the El Niño phenomenon.
While in residence at the RCC, he worked on his current book on The Anthropocene: A History of the Earth under Human Domination, which will examine the history of the realization that our species is making a mark on the planet so distinct and lasting that it will be readily detectable in the earth’s layered strata millions of years into the future. His research at the RCC will give special attention to the role that human exploitation of the lithosphere has played in producing these geological scale outcomes and the “first great acceleration” in human activities that occurred in the immediate wake of the Age of Revolution during the mid- to late nineteenth century.