Peer-Reviewed Publications

"Sprawling Fields of Cotton"
The Boom and Bust of Cotton in Gwinnett
🙞
Gwinnett County, Georgia and the Transformation
​of the American South, 1818-2018
(forthcoming, UGA Press, 2022)

"Taming the Wild Side of Bonaventure"
Tourism and the Contested Southern Landscape
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​Southern Cultures (2017)

"Taming the Wild Side of Bonaventure" explores competing visions for historic Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. Bonaventure was one of the most popular tourist sites in nineteenth-century America, and this article traces how its landscape was interpreted and transformed to appeal to tourists, from John Muir to John Berendt.

​"Constructive Not Destructive Development"
Permanent Uses of Resources in the South
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​Green Capitalism? (2017)

This essay explores the successes and failures of business-led conservation of natural resources in the post-Civil War South - one of the first attempts to implement what we now call sustainable development in the United States. It was published in Green Capitalism?: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century, a volume in the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture book series from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality"
Weighing Paths to Economic Development at the Dawn of the Environmental Era
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Environmental History (2011)

“Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality” considers how environmental groups used tourism to temper enthusiasm for industrialization in the South in the 1970s. Most scholars do not see the South as a part of the mainstream environmental movement, but conflicts over the future of the petrochemical industry reveal how environmentalists successfully challenged  the region’s wholesale devotion to heavy industry by promoting a seemingly more sustainable alternative in tourism.

"Piscatorial Politics"
​Fishery Regulation and the Economic Future of Rhode Island, 1869-1872
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The New England Quarterly (2011)​

"Piscatorial Politics" explores political clashes over the decline of coastal fish populations in 1870s Rhode Island. Although scholars see this as an era in which local fishermen were cut out of the process of resource management by government scientists, this article demonstrates how the political mobilization of New England’s commercial fishermen on the coast altered federal and state plans for the long-term management of fisheries in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Policy Reports & Whitepapers

Rooting Energy Equity in the South:
​A Review of Frameworks and Metrics [forthcoming]
Stakeholder Recommendations for Reducing Energy Insecurity in the Southeast United States

Other Publications

The hidden costs of affordable housing
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Saporta Report
March 21, 2021
An op-ed published in Atlanta's Saporta Report that discusses the prevalence of energy insecurity in Georgia, and what policy solutions are needed to support healthy, sustainable, and affordable housing.

Boost Resilience During Hot Weather
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Energy Efficiency Day
August 17, 2020
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​An overview of the ways that energy efficiency can make housing healthier, especially in times of high heat, and how energy efficiency upgrades can support vulnerable communities in the Southeast.
Powering the South with "White Coal"
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Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance
February 12, 2020
A history of the role of electric utilities in the American South, with an eye to the ways that early utilities harnessed free-flowing rivers to generate electricity.
The Fall and Rise of Energy Conservation Codes
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Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance
​January 9, 2020
An overview of the recent development of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), a significantly more energy efficient code than previous national model energy codes.
There’s a solution to the Southeast’s water crisis. But will Georgia and Florida agree to it?
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Washington Post
March 8, 2018
This op-ed, which ran in the Washington Post's "Made by History" column, explores the history of the Tri-State Water Wars - a decades-long legal battle over access to the water of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin now  playing out between Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. The case is being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, and this essay proposes a solution for how these states can equitably apportion the Southeast's scarce water. 
The First Green Developer
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​Edge Effects
October 20, 2016
This article explores complicated history of green tourism and coastal resort development by profiling the controversial career of developer Charles Fraser. Fraser was responsible for some of the most cutting-edge "green" resorts in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and this article considers his role as the nation's first green developer and the complex legacies that Fraser has left for ecotourism and environmentalism in the United States.
What Henry Grady can teach Atlanta about sustainable growth
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​Saporta Report
June 13, 2016
This op-ed reflects on the lessons that Henry Grady and other "New South" boosters can teach about sustainable development today. In the decades after the Civil War Grady and his contemporaries became preoccupied with the idea that there could be “permanent” ways of using the region’s dwindling natural resources. This op-ed explores the successes and failures of the South's search for environmental permanence and considers what this experience can tell us about the social and environmental components of sustainability in Atlanta today. 
​Southern Conservationism? Will Bryan '07 Says "Yes" 
​🙞​
​History at Furman
Fall/Winter 2016
This essay briefly explores the history of the conservation movement in the American South after 1865, The South is typically left out of histories of American conservation, but Southerners were vitally interested in applying conservation to their region. This essay considers how conservation in the South differed from the rest of the nation, to what extent conservationists succeeded, and what legacies they have left throughout the region.

Book Reviews