Thursday, March 2, 9PM – 10PM BJT

Speaker: Amy Kohout, Associate Professor in the Department of History, Colorado College

Host: Joseph Giacomelli, Assistant professor of history, Duke Kunshan University

Zoom ID:  940 920 4229

Abstract: 

Dr. Edgar Mearns was a U.S. army surgeon and naturalist who served at several posts in the U.S. West in the late nineteenth century, and later completed two tours of duty in the Philippines at the start of the twentieth. He collected specimens everywhere he was stationed, and alongside his military service is another kind of record: thousands of birds, carefully prepared and still present in the collections of the Smithsonian. In this talk, I examine the intersection of scientific and military work in the landscapes of Mearns’s service on both sides of the Pacific in order to explore the interplay of ideas about nature and empire in Progressive-Era America.

Biography:

Amy Kohout joined the History department at Colorado College in 2016, after serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Environmental Studies department at Davidson College during 2015-2016. She earned her B.A. in history from Yale University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She works on U.S. cultural and environmental history, and her research and teaching interests include the U.S. West, American empire, the Civil War and Reconstruction, museum studies, the history of natural history, world’s fairs, and the craft of writing history.

Amy’s first book, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers is forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press, as part of their new Many Wests series. In 2020-21, she held the David J. Weber Fellowship for the Study of Southwestern America at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. She is a 2022-2024 participant in the Bright Institute at Knox College.

Her work has been published in Museum History, Sustainability Science, Rethinking History, The Appendix, and A Companion to the History of American Science. Amy has worked on public-facing, collaborative projects centering historical research and writing; she was a co-founder of Backlist, a digital site where historians recommend books they love, and before that she served as an editor at The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history.

This event is organized by the Environmental Research Center and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China