Associate Professor
College of Arts Associate Dean
(Research & Graduate Studies)
PhD (History / History of Science) Princeton University, 1996
MA (History / History of Science) Princeton University, 1992
MS (Science and Technology Studies) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1990
BA (History and Philosophy of Science) University of Toronto, 1988
University of Guelph, Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies), College of Arts, 2009-
University of Guelph, Department of History, 2003-
The College of New Jersey, Associate Professor of History, 2002-2003
The College of New Jersey, Assistant Professor of History, 1997-2002
University of Minnesota. NSF Postdoctoral Research Associate in History of Science and Technology, 1996-1997
Latin American History
Environmental History
History of Science
Current Research
My research focuses on the environmental history of tropical crops and commodities, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I look at the interplay between economy and environment by studying the origins of epidemic crop diseases. My current research project is a global history of the coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), a catastrophic crop epidemic that spread across the world's coffee zones between 1870 and 1980. My other research and teaching interests include global history, commodity history, the history of science, technology, and medicine, disease and history, the history of natural disasters, and Latin American history. - Stuart
“Managing Monocultures: Coffee, The Coffee Rust, and the Science of Working Landscapes.” In Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences, edited by Jeremy Vetter, 87-107. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
“La roya del café en Costa Rica: epidemias, innovación, y ambiente, 1980-1995. [Coffee rust in Central America: Epidemics, Innovation, and Envrionment, 1980-1995].” Revista de Historia [Costa Rica], no. 59-60 (2009): 99-117.
“Nature, God, and Nation in Revolutionary Venezuela: The Holy Thursday Earthquake of 1812.” In Aftershocks: Earthquakes and Popular Politics in Latin America, edited by Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman Johnson, 43-69. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
“'The World Was My Garden': Tropical Botany and Cosmopolitanism in American Science, 1898-1935.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, 499-507. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
“Chronicle of a plague foretold: crop epidemics and the environmental history of coffee in the Americas.” Varia Historia 24, no. 39 (2008): 87-111.
“Global rust belt: Hemileia vastatrix and the ecological integration of world coffee production since 1850.” Journal of Global History 1, no. 02 (2006): 177-195.
“Plantas, petroleo, y progreso: las ciencias agrícolas y las ideologías de desarrollo en la época de Juan Vicente Gómez, 1908-1935,” in Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 14:1 (January-June 2003): 67-88.
States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
“Las epidemias liberales: agricultura, ambiente, y globalización en Ecuador, 1790-1930” in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en América Latina, Vol. 2, Norteamérica, Sudamérica, y el Pacífico, edited by Bernardo García Martínez and María del Rosario Prieto (México, El Colegio de México/Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 2002), 223-246.
“‘Giving Plants a Civil Status’: Scientific Representations of Nature and Nation in Costa Rica and Venezuela, 1885-1935,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 58 (April 2002): 513-536.
“Promoting the ‘Practical’: Science and Agricultural Modernization in Puerto Rico and Colombia, 1920-1940,” Agricultural History 75 (Winter 2001): 52-82.
with Angel L. Viloria, Franco Urbani, and Bernardo Urbani, “De Lausanne aux forêts vénézueliennes. Mission géologique de François de Loys (1892-1935) et les origines d’une controverse anthropologique," Bulletin de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles 86 (September 1999): 157-174.
“Creole Science: Botanical Surveys of Costa Rica, 1880-1940,” Endeavour 23 (1999): 118-120.
“‘It may be truth, but it is not evidence:’ Paul du Chaillu and the Legitimation of Evidence in the Field Sciences,” Osiris 11 (1996): 177-197; reprinted in Science, Race, and Ethnicity: Readings from Isis and Osiris, edited by John P. Jackson, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 341-361.
“Cosechas inciertas: la investigación agrícola bajo la dictadura de Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935),” in Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad en América Latina ed. Hebe Vessuri (Caracas: ALAS/Nueva Sociedad, 1994), 129-140.
