Rate My Professor Lydia Barnett

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.