Biography

Chris Wells is professor of environmental history in the Department of Environmental Studies at Macalester College, where he directs Macalester’s Digital Liberal Arts initiative and is Associate Director of the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. His research focuses on the ways that technology—and especially technological systems—have reshaped the American environment, mediating and structuring people’s relationships with the natural world. His first book, Car Country: An Environmental History (2012), focuses on the proliferation of car-dependent landscapes in the U.S. before 1956. His second book, Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader, is forthcoming from the Univ. of Washington Press.