Erin Stewart Mauldin, Ph.D.
Historian and Author
Argues that ecological shifts precipitated by the Civil War shaped the economic and agricultural choices of postwar southerners
Reinterprets the political relationship of black Southerners, particularly postwar sharecroppers, with the landscape they farmed
"The best ideas often refocus our attention on what was there all along. Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land is no exception." -- Matthew Stith, author of Extreme Civil War
"Beautifully written and deeply researched, Unredeemed Land is the first book to place the Civil War and emancipation at the center of the history of southern agriculture." -- Megan Kate Nelson, author of Saving Yellowstone
About me
I am the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida (St. Petersburg campus) and associate professor.
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.
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.
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), a new, updated version of which will appear in 2025. I also serve as the Co-Editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series at the University of Georgia Press.
My next book project is War and Conflict in American Environmental History, under contract with Routledge Press. Proceeding chronologically through U.S. history from the colonial period to the present, this book will examine the ways violent conflict has shaped and reshaped the nation's peoples, landscapes, and policies.
I live in St. Petersburg, Florida, with my husband, Daniel, and our two sons, Jack and Charlie.
Publications
Books
Oxford University Press, 2018
Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2012
SELECTED
Chapters & Articles
"The Environmental History of the United States," Companion to Global Environmental History, ed. J.R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, pp. 132-152
"The Stockman's War: Hog Cholera and the Fight to Close the Open Range in Reconstruction-Era Alabama," Alabama Review, March 2017
"Freedom, Ecological Change, and Economic Autonomy in the Cotton South, 1865-1880," Journal of the Civil War Era, September 2017
"Yankee Pigs and Dying Cattle: Military Logistics, Animal Disease, and Economic Power in the US and Colonial Africa in the 19th Century," Provisions of War, edited by Justin Nordstom, University of Arkansas Press, 2021
"Environmental History," Bloomsbury's History: Theory and Method
"Environmental History of Reconstruction," The Oxford Handbook of Reconstruction, edited by Andrew Slap, forthcoming
“The Plagues of War: The Human and Animal Infectious Diseases that Shaped Southern Appalachia during the Civil War Era,” in Appalachian Epidemics: An Interdisciplinary History from Pre-Contract to COVID, edited by Kevin Barksdale and Christopher White, University of Kentucky Press (in press)
teaching
CONTACT
ME
VISIT
USFSP
Department of History & Politics
140 7th Ave. S, SNL 100
(Snell House)
St. Petersburg, FL 33701