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 Ruin Nation
About me
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.
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 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.
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
"Juicy or Dry: Investigating Culture and Climate in 'Southern' Environmental History," Reviews in American History, June 2018
"Environmental History of Reconstruction," The Oxford Handbook of Reconstruction, edited by Andrew Slap, forthcoming
"Yankee Pigs: Agricultural Science and Colonial Policy in the Late Nineteenth Century," Provisions of War, edited by Justin Nordstom, University of Arkansas Press, 2021
"Environmental History," Bloomsbury's History: Theory and Method
News & Events
teaching
CONTACT
ME
VISIT
USFSP
Department of History & Politics
140 7th Ave. S, SNL 100
(Snell House)
St. Petersburg, FL 33701