Claire Campbell

Professor Campbell's research seeks to use environmental history to expand public history and public discussions of sustainability and environmental policy. She is interested in the preservation and interpretation of historic places, the role of the humanities in sustainability education, and historical inspirations for post-industrial society.

Her current project, Cities by the Sea: Urban Coastlines in Atlantic Canada, explores the environmental history of four port cities over the long nineteenth century (1760-1927).

• Editor, with Edward MacDonald and Brian Payne, The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). 
• Nature, Place, and Story: Rethinking Historic Sites in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
• Editor, with Robert Summerby-Murray, Land and Sea: Environmental History in Atlantic Canada (Acadiensis Press, 2013).
• Editor, A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011 (University of Calgary Press, 2011).  
• Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (University of British Columbia Press, 2004).  

• “Shore/Lines: Drawing Environmental Change on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island,” Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities, ed. Jeremy Chow (Bucknell University Press/Rutgers University Press, 2022) 105-135.
• “In the National Interest: Teaching about Canada and the Environment,” The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad, eds. Christopher Kirkey and Richard Nimijean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 47-68.
• “Whatever Happened to Pleasant Street? Rediscovering an Urban Shoreline in Halifax, Nova Scotia,” Environmental History 25:1 (January 2020) 134-149.
• “‘Rising with the Tide of History’: The Age of Sail as Industrial Alibi,” Papers in Canadian History & Environment 2 (May 2019) 1-37.
• “The Wealth of Wilderness,” The Nature of Canada, eds. Graeme Wynn and Colin Coates (University of British Columbia Press/On Point Press, 2019) 166-183.
• “Epilogue: Lessons of Time, Place, and an Island,” Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island, eds. Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFadyen, and Irene Novacezk (Island Studies Press/McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) 288-299.
• “Privileges and Entanglements: Lessons from History for Nova Scotia’s Politics of Energy,” Acadiensis 42:2 (2013) 114-137.

• Programme Chair, Fifth World Congress in Environmental History, Oulu, Finland (2024)
• Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Center for Canadian Studies, SUNY-Plattsburgh, 2022
• Brian Leigh Dunnigan Cartography Fellow, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, 2022-23, $1500
• Faculty Ambassador, “Confounding Problems: Public Humanities and the Arts,” Mellon Foundation, 2018-2021

An introduction to the history, politics, and culture of the northern half of North America, emphasizing the relationship between environment and national identity.

A study of certain cities in Canada and the United States rooted in archives that asks how nature and humanity interact in urban settings, and how history offers suggestions for a sustainable city. Issues include urban planning; water and shorelines; parks and green spaces; neighborhood politics; and others.

This class introduces the practices and purposes of studying our past relationships with nature, using in particular the environments of rivers, to better understand the origins of North America's landscapes today. Cross-listed as ENST 213.

Focusing on the North Atlantic and North America from the seventeenth century onward, this course reads maps as markers of our changing ideas about and impact on the natural world. Cross-listed as ENST 214 and GEOG 206.

A course that explores how different peoples — Indigenous, British, French, Canadian, and American — claimed and fought over the environments of North America, shaping today's national borders.

An in-depth exploration of different aspects of human interactions with the natural world over time. Currently themed to Islands and Coastlines. Cross-listed as ENST 301.

UNIV 200 The West, Nature, and National Myth (History and Film & Media Studies)
UNIV 200: The Politics and Meanings of Maps (History & Digital Humanities)
UNIV 200: The Anthropocene (History, Geology, Philosophy, & Religious Studies)
UNIV 200: The River Knows (History & Environmental Engineering)