Claire Campbell

https://www.bucknell.edu/fac-staff/claire-campbell

Professor Campbell is interested in the environmental history of North America and the North Atlantic world, and the history of Canada. She has taught at universities across Canada and in Denmark, in the areas of history, Canadian Studies, and Environment and Sustainability.

She sees the environmental past as an important part of both public history and discussions about sustainability: in the preservation and interpretation of historic places, the role of the humanities in sustainability education, and historical inspirations for a healthy post-industrial society.

Her publications include Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (2005) and Nature, Place, and Story: Rethinking Historic Sites in Canada (2017), as well as numerous articles in environmental history and edited collections on Atlantic Canada, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Parks Canada. Her most recent project, Cities by the Sea: Urban Coastlines in Atlantic Canada (forthcoming), examines the place of water in Atlantic cities and the changing shape of our urban waterfronts.

Educational Background 

• B.A., University of King's College at Dalhousie University
• M.A., Ph.D., Western University

Recent Publications
“Hardened Water: The Remaking of a Coastal City,” Coastal Studies & Society, 2:1 (2023), 112–36.

“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.

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).

“‘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.

Nature, Place, and Story: Rethinking Historic Sites in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)

 

Selected Honors and Fellowships

Bucknell University Scadden Fellowship, 2024

Ocean Frontier Institute, Visiting Fellow, 2023

Enders/ACSUS 50 Research Award, 2022

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

Faculty Ambassador, “Confounding Problems: Public Humanities and the Arts,” Mellon Foundation, 2018-2021

Dean’s Fellowship, Bucknell University, 2017-2018

Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies, Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University, 2013

Course Offerings

FOUN The City

An introduction to environmental history through a series of urban biographies. By studying art, cartography, literature, and archival materials, we’ll ask how these places took shape over the past four centuries, and their changing relationship with the natural world. How can we make our cities more blue, more green, and more livable?

FOUN Neighbours to the North

This course explores the relationship between Canada and the United States since the eighteenth century, especially through the lens of environmental history. It explores moments and places in time where the interaction between the two countries shaped the landscape of North America and the international boundary

HIST 100 Northern Exposures: Canada

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

HIST 210 Urban North America

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.

HIST 213 North American Environmental History

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.

HIST 215 Mapping History: Nature, Place, and Power

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. 

HIST 224 Eighteenth Century North America

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.

HIST 301 Seminar in Environmental History

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.

ENGR 320 Water Resources Engineering

In a unique pedagogical project we embed humanist questions about historical interventions into waterways in a required course in civil and environmental engineering.

Integrated Perspectives Courses

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)

Current Curriculum Vitae

Bluesky: @clairecampbell.bsky.social