Edmund Russell

Edmund Russell is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of United States History at the University of Kansas. Dr. Russell’s research synthesizes environmental history, American history, global history, history of technology, and science. His first major research project focused on the environmental history of warfare, culminating in a pair of books (his War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring and also Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War), the latter co-edited with Richard Tucker. His second major project has focused on co-evolutionary history, or the study of ways in which people have altered the traits of populations of nonhuman species and how these alterations have circled back to change human experience. This project led to his book titled Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth.

Dr. Russell’s research has received prizes in environmental history, history of technology, and history of science from the American Society for Environmental History, the Forest History Society, the Society for the History of Technology, and the Forum for the History of Science in America, respectively. He is co-editor of the series Studies in Environment and History for Cambridge University Press, distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, life member of Clare Hall at Cambridge University, and extraordinary member of the Human Sciences Center of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.