Profile

I’m an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. My work combines the methods and evidence of the humanities and natural sciences to explore how communities have responded to environmental changes, on Earth and across the solar system. I aim to better understand how environmental forces have shaped human history – partly to offer fresh perspectives on the gravest threats and greatest opportunities of the twenty-first century.

Much of my scholarship identifies past changes in climate and considers how they influenced human history. My first book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores how the Dutch Republic – the precursor of today’s Netherlands – endured the Little Ice Age, a period of natural climatic cooling. The book reveals that while climatic cooling worsened disasters that the Dutch struggled to overcome, it also offered opportunities that the Dutch aggressively exploited. The Frigid Golden Age was named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of 2018. Currently, I am co-editing a series of volumes that consider different dimensions of past climate change in order to inform present-day policy, including The Oxford University Press Handbook of Resilience in Climate History.

I also publish widely in historical and scientific journals, including Nature, Science, Isis, and The American Historical Review. In many of my articles, I uncover how populations found ways to cope with climate change. I believe that such examples of “resilience” and “adaptation” have been systematically understudied in scholarship on the history of climate change. I have also worked to develop new methods for connecting human and climatic histories; to uncover new relationships between climate change and conflict; and to incorporate the histories of animals within the human history of climate change.

I have created or co-created a range of popular online resources on the history of climate change. Most recently, I debuted a multimedia project, The Climate Chronicles, that tells the full story of climate change, from the evolution of our hominid ancestors to the warming present. The Chronicles is a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a popular website, all in one.

Video trailers for The Climate Chronicles:

A second, major area of focus for me is the environmental history of outer space. My second book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System (Harvard University Press/Viking, 2025), reimagines the solar system as a mosaic of environments organized and entangled by the forces of electromagnetism and gravity. The book argues that real and perceived changes in these environments shaped human history in previously untold ways. It also shows how, today, environmental changes across the solar system not only influence human actions, but are increasingly caused by them. Ripples has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Foreword Reviews.

I am now authoring or co-authoring several other books. The first, tentatively entitled Breach, reframes the early history of the Space Age as a close encounter with potentially world-altering microbial contamination. This work has led me to become a scholar of existential risks, meaning risks capable of imperiling all humans. My goal for Breach is to develop a roadmap for mitigating the risks that humanity faces today, from artificial superintelligence to a genetically engineered pandemic. A second book also has a tentative title – The Winds of War – and will explore how climate change influenced (and was influenced by) conflict over the past 25,000 years. A third book, The Atlas of Global Environmental History, will provide a sweeping overview of the environmental changes that have shaped humanity’s past.

A series of videos introducing Ripples:

While working on these and other projects, I teach courses at Georgetown on topics that include the Little Ice Age, the impacts of global warming, the environmental history of outer space, existential risk, and the Anthropocene. I regularly plan major events at Georgetown that explore different dimensions of today’s environmental crises, as well as outer space exploration, exploitation, and settlement.

I also aim to bring the lessons of the past to policymakers and the general public. I regularly give lectures to audiences around the world, and my writing has appeared in Aeon, The Conversation, National Geographic, and the Washington Post, among other outlets. I have been interviewed for articles that appeared in, for example, Axios, the BBC, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Popular Science, Space.com, and the Washington Post. News media in five continents have announced findings from my scholarship, occasionally in major feature articles.