Erin Stewart Mauldin, Ph.D.
Historian and Author

I am the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida (St. Petersburg campus).

I am the author of Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford, 2018), and the Co-Editor of the Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). I also serve as the Co-Editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series at the University of Georgia Press.

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Trained as an environmental historian, my work explores the intersection of race, economic inequality, and environment in the 19th-century U.S. South, bridging the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. 

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I borrow heavily from the environmental sciences to reframe big questions of southern history: slavery as capitalism, the impacts of the Civil War and emancipation on southern agriculture, rural impoverishment in the shadow of “King Cotton,” the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization, and environmental injustice.

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I teach U.S. and Environmental History courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, with an emphasis on material between the early modern period and World War II.  

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I live in St. Petersburg, Florida, with my husband, Daniel, and our two sons, Jack and Charlie.​

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