Robert Gioielli

Membership:  2010/2011/2019

Member Bio

Robert Gioielli was a Carson Fellow in 2010, 1011, 2019, and 2022. Currently the Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, he is an environmental historian, with a particular interest in the intersections of race, justice, and the urban environment, as well as the critical history of environmentalism. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches courses in history and environmental studies and directs the Blue Ash College Honors Program. His first book explored how the American environmental justice movement emerged from protests and organizing by poor, working class and minority urbanites in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the active destruction of their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. After writing a history of environmentalism from the bottom up, he explored it from the top down, spending a few years researching environmental philanthropy, as well as the culture and politics of international wildlife conservation.

Publications

  • Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, May 2014. Paperback July 2015.
  • “Pruitt-Igoe in the Suburbs: Connecting White Flight, Sprawl and Climate Change in Metropolitan America” for “Bounded Democracy,” special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien, edited by Bryant Simon and Anke Ortlepp. December 2020.
  • “Don’t Do it in the Lake: Gordon Sherman and the Public Interest in Postwar Chicago,” for City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, William Barnett, Kathleen Brosnan and Ann Durkin Keating, eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.
  • “We Must Destroy You to Save You: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons,” Radical History Review, Issue 109, Theme: “Enclosure,” Winter 2011.
  • “Get the Lead Out: Environmental Politics in 1970s St. Louis,” Journal of Urban History, 36 (4), May 2010.