Home>Evan Bonney
Research Interest(s): U.S. History; Environmental history; history of U.S. federal administration; North America; Diplomatic relations over environments shared between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico
Discipline(s): History
Research Group(s): Humanities. Lives, Materialities, Representations
Geographical Area(s): North America
Language(s): English, French, German
Biography
I study how empires function. Examining the creation of the U.S. Forest Service, my dissertation demonstrates that forestry significantly changed how Washington worked between 1891 and 1914. A practice that melded the sciences and law enforcement, forestry was not just a powerful instrument to govern the United States at century’s turn. It was also a tool readily applied by empires worldwide, one that asserted the authority of the State by incorporating challenging environments, and by creating new markets for resources. My work, thus, examines how the sciences, power, and governance converged to administer the United States empire at the turn of the twentieth century, an empire that included the Intermountain States of the U.S. West, and whose strategies of rule crafted what many now identify as the modern U.S. “administrative state”.
Thesis Supervision
Thesis advisors: Mario Del Pero (Sciences Po, CHSP) & Giacomo Parrinello (Sciences Po, CHSP).
Thesis topic
"Forestry and power in the United States Empire, 1891-1914"
Teaching
- Environmental histories of North America;
- Long European Nineteenth Century;
- Narratives of the Past
AWARDS
- Graduate Fellow, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University;
- Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Fellowship, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR);
- Fellow, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, & Medicine (Philadelphia, PA, USA);
- Charles Redd Center Fellowship for Western History, Brigham Young University (Provo, UT, USA)
