Research Interests

RESEARCH PROJECTS

• I am currently working on a book on the history of the organized summer camp movement in American culture
• The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: During the 2005-06 academic year I was a Carnegie Scholar at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL).  This work has resulted in Citizenship Across the Curriculum (Indiana University Press, 2010), a volume I contributed to (see below) and co-edited with Rebecca Nowacek of Marquette University and Jeff Bernstein of Eastern Michigan University.
• My newest SoTL project involves an examination of learning through the evolution of student-produced wikis for a problem-based history assignment.   Beginning in 2012 this project will be funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant.
• Liberty Hyde Bailey and the origins of environmental education
• The environmental history of photographic chemicals 

PEER REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

• "The Citizenship Imperative and the Role of Faculty Development," with Rebecca Nowacek and Jeff Bernstein in To Improve the Academy, Vol. 30 (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011): 54-70.
• "Local Environmental History and the Journey to Ecological Citizenship," in Smith, Nowacek, Bernstein, eds., Citizenship Across the Curriculum (Indiana University Press, 2010)
• “What History‟s Good For: Service Learning and Studying the Past,” Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences 2 (Winter 2009): 31-49.
• “‘Silence, Miss Carson!’: Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring,” in Lisa Sederis, ed., On Nature’s Terms: The Legacy and Challenge of Rachel Carson (SUNY Press, 2008).
• “The ‘Ego Ideal’ of the Summer Camper and The Nature of Summer Camp” Environmental History 11 (January 2006): 70-101.
• “'Silence, Miss Carson!'”: Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring,” Feminist Studies, 27 (Fall 2001): 733-52.
• "The Short Life of a Dark Prophesy: The Rise and Fall of the Population Bomb Crisis, 1965-1975," in Nancy Schultz, ed., Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999): 331-54.
• "The Value of a Tree: Public Debates of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot," The Historian 60 (Summer 1998): 277-298.