Aaron Sachs

Professor

120 Mary Ann Wood Dr.
as475@cornell.edu
607/255-1978

Education

Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University, 2004.

A.B. magna cum laude in History and Literature, Harvard University, 1992.

Departments and programs

American Studies Program
Environment & Sustainability Program
History

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Academic interests

Cultural
Historical Geography
Intellectual
Environmental

Overview

My work combines cultural, intellectual, and environmental history with creative writing. As of Summer 2025, I've just finished a book manuscript called "The Earth Is Ours, Not Mine": A History of Environmental Justice. It explores the deep history (going back 500 years in the western world) of a theme I've been working through since 1995, when I published a pamphlet for the Worldwatch Institute entitled Eco-Justice: Linking Human Rights and the Environment. Questions of ecological interconnection and social justice will always be at the heart of my scholarship.

My new project's working title is The Survival of Utopia: The Strange, Transatlantic History of an Appalachian Experiment. It's a microhistory of the utopian community of Rugby, Tennessee, founded in 1880 by an English reformer and novelist named Thomas Hughes, most famous for writing one of the bestselling books of all time, Tom Brown's School Days, which happens to have had an outsize influence on the Harry Potter series. My book about Rugby (also the name of the school Tom Brown attended) will use a variety of storytelling techniques to suggest the community's rich cultural context and enduring significance. It's a story about Christian Socialism, Anglo-American relations, life in the Cumberland Mountains, and the endless work of fighting against the status quo to reshape society.

My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary approaches. In my graduate teaching, I have worked with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history, to a survey of the modern U.S. through literary perspectives, to a seminar on environmental justice. I'll soon be introducing a new seminar called Surviving Dark Times, which will examine a few difficult periods in western history (the Black Death, religious wars, slavery/Jim Crow) and a few different coping strategies (storytelling, music, comedy). Often in my teaching as well as in my research I come back to intellectual traditions of dissent.

In support of younger scholars who also care about creative writing, I spent 15 years as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers (HAW!), which brought together Cornell graduate students who believed that academic writing could be moving on a deeply human level. I have also sought to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I were the co-editors). Those initiatives are no longer active, but I hope their example will continue to inspire others, as in the case of the Non-Academic Writing Workshop (or NAWW!) at Harvard.

I was also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which for a decade brought together faculty and graduate students across all the environmental disciplines on campus. And it has been a pleasure helping to establish the now-thriving Environment and Sustainability Program, offering a major that unites the College of Arts and Sciences with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Research Focus

American cultural
Intellectual and environmental history

Awards and Honors

Elected to the Society of American Historians (for literary distinction in the writing of history and biography), 2025.

Named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians (OAH), 2023.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Up from the Depths), Biography, 2023.

Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2018-19.

Social Science, Humanities, and Arts Fellowship, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University, Spring 2018.

Humanities Grant, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, Summer 2016, for a Conference on Creative Academic Writing (held May 2017).

Honorable Mention, 2013 New England Book Festival (for Arcadian America), given by the JM Northern Media Family of Festivals, in the General Non-Fiction Category.

Faculty Fellowship, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University (focal theme: The Environment and the American Past), 2013-14.

Award for Excellence in the Teaching, Advising, and Mentoring of Graduate and Professional Students (one of three recipients in the second year this award was given out), Cornell University, May 2013.

Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists (for merit in teaching and scholarship), Cornell University, 2010.

Faculty Fellowship, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University (focal theme: Water: A Critical Concept for the Humanities), 2008-09.

Honorable Mention, Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in U.S. History, Organization of American Historians, 2007

John Addison Porter Prize (for my dissertation), Yale University, 2005.

George Washington Egleston Historical Prize (for my dissertation), Yale University, 2005.

Prize Teaching Fellowship, Yale University, 2003-4.

Mrs. Giles Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, 2003-4.

Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education, 1998-2002.

Honorary Mellon Fellowship, 1998-9.

Project Censored Award in U.S. journalism, for an article on Nigerian playwright and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1997.

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, 1992.

Best Senior Thesis in History and Literature, Harvard University, 1992.

Most Promising Junior in History and Literature, Harvard University, 1991.

Publications

BOOKS:

“The Earth Is Ours, Not Mine”: A History of Environmental Justice (forthcoming in 2026/27)

Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight Against Climate Change (NYU Press, April 2023). Paperback in June 2025.

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times (Princeton University Press, June 2022). Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the Biography category. Paperback in June 2024.

(John Demos, co-editor): Artful History: A Practical Anthology (Yale University Press, Feb. 2020, in the series New Directions in Narrative History).

Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (Yale U. Press, Jan. 2013, in the series New Directions in Narrative History). Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Paperback came out in March 2014.

The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking, August 2006).

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES:

“A.J. Downing and American Culture,” Hudson River Valley Review 33 (Spring 2017), 29-38.

“Lewis Mumford’s Urbanism and the Problem of Environmental Modernity,” Environmental History 21 (October 2016), 638-59.

“American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010), 206-35.

“Letters to a Tenured Historian: Imagining History as Creative Nonfiction—or Maybe even Poetry,” Rethinking History 14 (March 2010), 5-38.

“Civil Rights in the Field: Carey McWilliams as a Public-Interest Historian and Social Ecologist,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (May 2004), 215-48.

“The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature,” History and Theory, Theme Issue on the Environment, Vol. 42 (Dec. 2003), 111-35.

SELECTED MAGAZINE AND OTHER ARTICLES:

“The Lessons Moby-Dick has for a Warming World of Rising Waters,” The Conversation (online), November 2021.

“As Herman Melville Turns 200, His Works Have Never Been More Relevant,” The Conversation (online), August 2019.

“A Different Kind of Wildness: Environmental Humor and Cultural Resilience,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, Winter 2019.

“My Atlantis Complex,” podcast in the “What Makes Us Human” series, published by Cornell University, October 2017.

“The Hidden Music of Words,” The American Scholar (online), October 2016.

“Urban Refuge: How America’s Cemeteries Became Places of Repose for Both People and Animals,” Orion (November/December 2015).

“Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: A Calming Influence,” invited article for the series “Reading Lessons” on the American Scholar website (July 2015), available at https://theamericanscholar.org/wallace-stegners-where-the-bluebird-sings-to-the-lemonade-springs/#.VcyCqbc1dPR

“The Bookroom,” invited article for the series “Writing Lessons” on the American Scholar website (Feb. 2015), available at https://theamericanscholar.org/the-bookroom/#.VQi22mazBFU

“The Light Bulb and the Oil Spill: Two Modern Fables,” article for Cornell’s Climate Change Forum (September 2014), available at: http://climatechange.cornell.edu/the-light-bulb-and-the-oil-spill-two-modern-fables/

“Back to the Neotechnic Future: An Online Interview with the Ghost of Lewis Mumford,” The Appendix (July 2014).

“Better than Yosemite? Mount Auburn from the Perspective of Environmental History,” Sweet Auburn (Summer 2014).

“Take a Walk through a Cemetery,” radio essay for “The Academic Minute,” WAMC, Public Radio, aired on May 14, 2013, available at: http://www.wamc.org/post/dr-aaron-sachs-cornell-university-graveyards-and-urban-parks.

“America’s Other Best Idea: Revisiting Mount Auburn,” Boston Globe, Ideas section, Sunday, January 13, 2013.

SELECTED BOOK CHAPTERS:

“Energy in U.S. History,” in Jon Butler, ed., The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, online at http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/browse?t1=ORE_AMH:REFAH019 (2015).

“Stumps in the Wilderness,” in Brian Allen Drake, ed., The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

“Looking Backward (Not Forward) to Environmental Justice,” in Michael Renner and Thomas Prugh, eds., State of the World 2014 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute and Island Press, May 2014).

“Walking Meditation,” in Bob Beatty and Carol Kammen, Zen and the Art of Local History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).

“Cultures of Nature in the Nineteenth Century,” in Douglas Sackman, ed., Blackwell Companion to American Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

SELECTED BOOK REVIEWS:

Review of Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 2020), California History 99 (Nov. 2022), 121-23.

Review of Phoebe S.K. Young, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2021), Journal of the Civil War Era 12 (Sept. 2022), 419-22.

Review of James Schlett, A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 2015), Hudson River Valley Review 34 (Fall 2017), 103-106.

Review of Ann McCutchan, River Music: An Atchafalaya Story, with the CD Atchafalaya Soundscapes by Earl Robicheaux (College Station: Texas A+M University Press, 2011), Louisiana History, Vol. LV (Fall 2014), 480-83.

“Our Common Traumas,” Review of Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), and David G. Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2011), American Quarterly, Vol. 66 (March 2014), 235-43.

Review of Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008), American Historical Review, Vol. 114 (June 2009), 795-6.

“Special Topics in Calamity History: A Review of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 35 (Sept. 2007), 453-63.

Review of Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, John P. Clark and Camille Martin, Eds. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), Historical Geography, Vol. 33 (2005), 256-8.