Robert Suits

Academic position: Lecturer in Environmental History

Department: History

Email: r.suits@ucl.ac.uk

Biography:

Robert Suits is a Lecturer in Environmental History. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago before holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Calgary and at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on energy, climate, and labor. His first book, The Hobo: An Environmental History, explores how migrant work in the industrial United States developed in response to energy transitions and climate disasters; he is also the lead researcher on a wide-ranging digital history project exploring energy transitions across U.S. history.

Research Projects:

• The Hobo: An Environmental History (book manuscript, under review)
• “Beyond Rainmaking: Climate Engineering on the Nineteenth Century Great Plains,” Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 137–153, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad041
• “Hoboes, Wheat, and Climate Precarity,” Agricultural History (2023) 97 (1): 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-10154297 
• Interactive website: “Energy Transitions in U.S. History, 1800-2019,” http://us.sankey.rdcep.org/
• Interactive website: “A Physical Inventory of the U.S. Energy System,” http://us.infrastructure.rdcep.org/  

Teaching:

TBC