Rate My Professor Christopher Sneddon

Christopher Sneddon is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, serving as Chair of the Department of Geography since 2017. He joined the faculty in 2000 as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, and to full Professor in 2015. He also holds appointments as Professor in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program and affiliated faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages. Sneddon earned a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota in 2000, focusing on socio-ecological transformations and water conflicts in Northeast Thailand. He received an M.S. in Resource Policy and Planning from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment in 1993, examining environmental movements in Southeast Asia, and a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin in 1987, followed by service as a U.S. Peace Corps fisheries volunteer in the Philippines from 1988 to 1990.

Sneddon's research and teaching explore nature-society relations, political ecology, environmental politics, transboundary river basins, sustainable development, and the politics of scale, with emphasis on water conflicts, large dam construction and removal, and river basin transformations, particularly in the Mekong River Basin and New England. His book Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (University of Chicago Press, 2015) received the 2016 Meridian Book Award from the Association of American Geographers. He co-edited Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization and Participation (Routledge, 2013). Highly cited publications include 'Sustainable development in a post-Brundtland world' (2006, 1349 citations), 'Rethinking transboundary waters: A critical hydropolitics of the Mekong basin' (2006, 506 citations), and 'Peopling the environmental state: River restoration and state power' (2021). With over 5000 citations on Google Scholar, his work influences geography and environmental studies. Sneddon has received grants from the NSF, MacArthur Foundation, U.S. Institute of Peace, and Rockefeller Center, along with awards like the J. Kenneth Huntington-John M. Manley Memorial Award (2006).