Courtney Fullilove is a Professor of History at Wesleyan University, with appointments in the College of Science and Technology Studies, Bailey College of the Environment, and College of Design and Engineering Studies.
Her scholarship focuses on agricultural history, global environmental history, and the history of science and technology, with an emphasis on bio-cultural knowledge production. Her book, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017), situates American agriculture’s global dominance within millennia of collective stewardship of plant knowledge, arguing that understanding this history is crucial to shaping a more sustainable and just future. She pursues paths to such futures in recent writings on biodiversity, plant genetics, and post-industrial natural and built environments.
Fullilove’s courses include Energy Legacies and Ecological Futures, Food Security: History of an Idea, Cold War Environmental History, The Long 19th Century in the U.S., and History of the End. She is currently pursuing interdisciplinary projects across the arts, humanities and sciences on the site of a shuttered fossil fuel plant in the Long Island Sound. She holds a PhD in History from Columbia University.