Erin Stewart Mauldin
John Hope Franklin Chair of Southern History
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director
CONTACT Information and CV
Office: SNL 100
Email: emauldin@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2014
TEACHING
My goal as an educator is to advance students鈥� understanding from the misconception
that history is a series of 鈥渇acts鈥� to be memorized to the realization that history
is a question-driven enterprise. I want students to consider not just what we know about history, but how we know it. I teach courses on the 18th, 19th, and 20th century U.S. as well as thematic
courses in environmental history, military history, legal history, and food history.
I also occasionally teach our Methods and Materials classes, the U.S. History surveys,
and graduate seminars in St. Petersburg. I use a variety of interactive and field-based
learning strategies in all of my courses, with an emphasis on community engagement.
My students have produced historical markers for local neighborhoods, launched exhibits
at a living history park, collected oral histories, made podcasts, digitally catalogued
artifacts collected at community 鈥淗istory Harvests,鈥� produced digital walking tours,
and more.
RESEARCH
Interdisciplinarity forms the methodological underpinning of my work, and I borrow
heavily from the natural sciences, geography, and environmental sociology to reframe
the big questions of nineteenth-century southern history: the impacts of the Civil
War and emancipation on southern agriculture, economic stagnation in the shadow of
鈥淜ing Cotton,鈥� and, more recently, the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization.
My book, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton
South, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It was awarded the 2019 Wiley-Silver
Book Prize and CHOICE magazine designated it an Outstanding Academic Title. I am also
the co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Global Environmental History, now available in an all-new and revised second edition (2025), and have published
work in The Journal of the Civil War Era, The Alabama Review, and edited volumes including The Oxford Handbook on Reconstruction, Battlefields and Homefronts, Appalachian Epidemics, and Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. My next book project, under contract with Routledge Press, it titled War and Environment in American History. I am also working on another monograph, tentatively titled, The First White Flight, which investigates the role of industrial pollution in shaping the urban geography
of the New South.
I am also the Co-Editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series (University of Georgia Press).
Oxford University Press, 2018
Wiley Blackwell, 2025 (2nd ed.)