Lydia Barnett is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, having joined as Assistant Professor in 2015. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Oberlin College in 2003, majoring in History and Philosophy, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2011. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows (2011-2013) and Assistant Professor at Bates College (2013-2015). Specializing as a historian of science and the environment in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, her scholarship addresses the intersections of science, religion, environmental thought, disasters, climate, and empire. Her acclaimed first book, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), reveals how Christian theological interpretations of global floods shaped early planetary environmental awareness. It won the 2019 Morris D. Forkosch Prize and was a finalist for the George Perkins Marsh Prize (2020), Oscar Kenshur Prize (2020), and Turku Book Award (2021).

Her ongoing book project, Earth Work, explores earth knowledge from laborers and communities within Little Ice Age scientific networks. Key recent publications include “Eco-Prospecting in Early Modern Wetlands” (Isis, 2023); “Showing and Hiding: The Flickering Visibility of Earth Workers in the Archives of Earth Science” (History of Science, 2020); “Giant Bones and the Taunton Stone: American Antiquities, World History, and the Protestant International” (in Empires of Knowledge, Routledge, 2019); “Strategies of Toleration” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2015); and “The Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment’s Anthropocene” (Environmental History, 2015). Research support includes fellowships from the National Science Foundation (2008-09), Woodrow Wilson Foundation (2004-05), Max Planck Institute (2016), Huntington Library Dibner Fellowship (2021-22), and Howard Foundation (2024-25). Affiliated with Northwestern’s Science in Human Culture, Environmental Policy and Culture, and Trienens Institute programs, she co-leads the Shifting Shorelines project (2024-2028). Barnett teaches on science, medicine, disasters, and environmental history, receiving the 2022 E. Leroy Hall Teaching Award.

Professional Email: lydia.barnett@northwestern.edu