Joseph Cullon
Assistant Teaching Professor
Humanities & Arts
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
United States of America
Biography
Education: B.S. Natural Resources Cornell University 1991 M.S. Environmental Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison 1995 M.A History University of Wisconsin, Madison 1998 Ph.D. History University of Wisconsin, Madison 2003 One of Professor Cullon’s students recently called him “strangely fascinating.” He knew that he was strange but he was happy to learn that a student founding his approach to teaching fascinating. He likes to encourage students to see history not as a mass of dead facts but as a vital mode of inquiry and a moral project that has the potential to inform the present as much as illuminate the past. Having previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dartmouth College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he finds teaching WPI students especially invigorating because of their abiding curiosity and diligence. Professor Cullon received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He has twice served as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, first at the American Antiquarian Society (2005-2006) and then with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary (2008-2009). Professor Cullon works across the boundaries of early American social, economic, environmental and technological history. Presently, he is completing revisions to his first monograph, Work upon the Ark: New England Shipbuilding and the Launching of the British Maritime Empire (under contract with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Imprint of the University of North Carolina Press). In this manuscript, Professor Cullon breaks down the too often dichotomous pairing of land and water in Atlantic history to reveal that English colonial development was an amphibious affair. In addition, Wiley-Blackwell will soon publish his documents collection on the American Revolution as part of its “Uncovering the Past” series.
Research Interest
Early American History; History of Science and Technology; Environmental History; Digital History and Humanities
Publications
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“Legacies and Limitations: Environmental Historians Reconsider Progressive Conservation,†Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2002).
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Review Essay, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domesticated Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press,2004) and Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). New England Quarterly (Winter 2005).
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“Past as Prologue: The National Park Service and the Reintegration of the Blackstone Valley’s History,†in Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Hanover: University Press of New England for the Worcester Historical Museum, 2009).
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“A River Transformed, A Valley Remade,†in Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Hanover: University Press of New England for the Worcester Historical Museum, 2009).
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Era of the American Revolution: A History in Documents (London and Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming, December 2014)
