History Ph.D. candidate Camille Cole recently received the Joel A. Tarr Prize for the best article, published in either a journal or edited volume, on the relationship between technology and the environment in history. Her article, “Precarious Empires: A Social and Environmental History of Steam Navigation on the Tigris,” was published in the Journal of Social History. It links the history of technology, environmental history, and the history of empire through a case study of the steamship in Southern Iraq. According to Kellen Backer, a member of the selection committee and a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Syracuse University, Cole’s article “is an impressive study that opens up new pathways for envirotech historians to pursue.”
Read the full article and interview at the MacMillan Center website.