Dr. Erin Mauldin is an environmental historian of the 19th-century U.S. South whose work explores the intersection of race, economic inequality, and environment. She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Georgetown University in 2014 and her dissertation, “Unredeemed Land: The U.S. Civil War, Changing Land Use Practices, and the Environmental Limitations of Agriculture in the South, 1840-1880,” won the Harold N. Glassman Award for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. 

The manuscript version was published with Oxford University Press as Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South in October 2018. Her work borrows heavily from the natural sciences, geography, and sociology to reframe the “big” questions of 19th-century southern history: slavery as capitalism, the impacts of the Civil War and emancipation on southern agriculture, economic stagnation in the shadow of “King Cotton,” and, more recently, the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization.

She has published articles in The Journal of the Civil War Era and The Alabama Review, is the co-editor of the Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and serves as the Book Review Editor for Agricultural History. She is currently working on her second monograph, which connects the narrative of the rural South in the long Civil War era to that of the urbanizing, industrializing South. Tentatively titled, “The First White Flight: Industrial Pollution and Racial Segregation in New South Cities,” this project examines the iterative process of environmental racism over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and investigates the role played by pollution in racializing urban spaces, reinforcing disenfranchisement, creating racially-segmented economies, and furthering environmental degradation. Dr. Mauldin teaches a range of courses in both U.S. and environmental history.