I am a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. In my teaching and research, I bridge the humanities and the sciences to explore how societies have thrived - or suffered - in the face of dramatic changes in the natural world. I hope to glean lessons from the past that will help us confront our imminent future. I use public and digital histories to bring these lessons to journalists, policymakers, and the general public.
In a new book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press), I explain how one society - the Dutch Republic - thrived as others faltered when volcanic eruptions and changes in solar radiation cooled Earth's climate between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. I am currently working on two new books: Civilization and the Cosmos (Harvard University Press), which traces how environmental changes in outer space helped shape the course of human history, and Coping with Climate Change, which unearths examples of societies that thrived amid natural and anthropogenic climate changes over the past millennium.
I am the founder and director of HistoricalClimatology.com, a website that receives roughly 500,000 hits annually. I am also the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network, an organization of roughly 200 academics in humanistic and scientific disciplines. I founded and host the Climate History Podcast, and I founded Climate Tipping Points, a student-driven project that aims to introduce a broad audience to the local consequences of climate change. Click here to send me a message. |
| Dr. Dagomar Degroot | Dr. Dagomar Degroot |