Research Publications
Books
Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (Chicago, 2019) + Digital Companion site @ purefood.lafayette.edu [for more, see here, here, here, and here]
Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil & Society in the American Countryside (Yale, 2009)
Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement, ed. (MIT Press, 2011) [co-edited with G. Ottinger]
Select articles
“Engineering and Environmental Justice,” in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Engineering, edited by Diane Michelfelder and Neelke Doorn (Routledge, 2019)
“Greening Lafayette: A Model for Building Sustainable Community,” International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education (forthcoming, 2018) [co-authored with K. Lawrence, A. Armstrong, M. Wilcha, and A. Gatti]
“Fence and Fallow,” New Geographies 10 (forthcoming, 2018)
“Margins and Tensions and the History of Seeds,” essay on Courtney Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture, H-Environment Roundtable Review, 8 (August 2018): 7-13
“Undone Earthquakes,” essay on Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, H-Environment Roundtable Review, 5 (March 2015): 4-9
“Science, Technology and Society [STS] and Ethics,” [co-authored with Stephen Cutcliffe] in J. Britt Holbrook and Carl Mitcham, eds., Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: A Global Resource, 2nd edition. 4 Vols. Farmington Hills, MA: Macmillan Reference, USA, 2015. pp. 54-59.
“The Appearance of Being Earnest,” The Appendix 3 (October 2014): 37-43
“Don’t Mono-crop the Movement: Toward a Cultural Ecology Local Food,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 14.1 (Spring 2014): 5-8
“Introducing Engineering as a Socio-technical Process,” Proc. 2014 ASEE Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN [co-authored with Kristen Sanford Bernhardt and Jenn Rossmann]
“The Historical Production (and Consumption) of Unsustainability: Technology, Policy, and Culture,” The Hedgehog Review 14.2 (Summer 2012): 37-52
“Environmentally Just Transformations of Expert Cultures: Toward the Theory and Practice of a Renewed Science and Engineering,” Environmental Justice 5 (2012): 158-163 [co-authored with G. Ottinger]
“Analysis as Border Patrol: Chemists along the Boundary between Pure Food and Real Adulteration,” Endeavour 35 (2011): 66-73
“The Moral Basis of Soil Science and Geology: What Antebellum Farmers Knew and Why Anyone Cared,” Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010): 860-867
“Embodying STS: Identity, Narrative, and the Interdisciplinary Body,” Science as Culture 19 (March 2010): 1-14 [co-authored with W. Galusky]
“Three Peasants on Their Way to a Meal: Millet’s The Gleaners, Macaroni, and Human Intervention in Nature,” Environmental History 14 (October 2009): 744-752
“The Once and Future Georgic: Agricultural Practice, Environmental Knowledge, and the Place for an Ethic of Experience,” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (3) (2009): 153-165
“What Makes a Difference? Science and Epistemic Authority in the Early American Republic,” Historically Speaking 10 (January 2009): 23-24
“Virginia’s Modern Environmental History,” in Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (2009)
“Surveying Nature: The Environmental Dimensions of Virginia’s First Geological Survey, 1835-1842,” Environmental History 11 (January 2006): 38-69
“Escaping the False Binary of Nature and Culture through Connection: Richard White’s The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River,” Organization and Environment 18 (October 2005): 445-457
Current projects
Edited anthology
"Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food," co-edited with Michael Kideckel and Anna Zeide (in progress, 2018) [part of the June 2018 workshop for the book]
Cross-university collaborations
History for a Sustainable Future (a book series at the MIT Press [editorial board member] and a working group of environmental historians and historians of science)