Professor, History
- PhD, University of California Irvine, History
- MA, University of California Irvine, History
- BA, Lawrence University, History
Colin Fisher has been a member of the USD history department since 2002. He teaches classes in U.S. environmental history, U.S. history of food, history documentary film production, environmental visual culture, among others. He has also taught the senior thesis sequence required of all history majors.
Areas of Expertise
Environmental history; urban environmental history; environmental justice; race, labor, and migration and environmental history; parks; subaltern environmental culture and politics.
Scholarly Work
Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), argues that it was not just affluent Anglo Americans who sought out nature during their leisure. During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, recent immigrants, their American-born children, African Americans, and industrial workers also sometimes sought to temporarily escape “artificial” urban environments and come into contact with nature. Chicagoans sought out nature not only in rural and wild landscapes outside of Chicago, but also in urban green spaces: city parks, the Lake Michigan shore, commercialized parks and beer gardens, and even vacant lots. I also show how marginalized Chicagoans used landscapes in “nature’s nation” to forge subaltern German, Irish, Polish, African-American, and working-class identities.
Other work includes:
“Collective Memory for the African Motherland in Interwar Black Chicago and the Limits of the Environmental Justice Model,” in Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, ed. Traci Brynne Voyles and Mary E. Mendoza (University of Nebraska Press, 2025).
“‘Green is the Color of the Luxuriant Vegetation of Our Motherland’: Marcus Garvey, Temporality, and Wilderness as a Repeating Phase,” Environmental History, 29 (July 2024).
“Antebellum Black Climate Science: The Medical Geography and Emancipatory Politics of James McCune Smith and Martin Delany,” Environmental History 26 (July 2021)
“May Day: The Green Vision of Chicago’s Gilded Age Anarchists,” in City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, ed. Kathy Brosnan, Ann Keating, and William Barnett (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
“The Crossroads of U.S. Environmental History and Migration History,” JAm It - Journal of American Studies in Italy, 1 (May 2020)
“Multicultural Wilderness: Immigrants, African Americans, and Working Class Leisure in the Forest Preserves and Dunes of Industrial Chicago,” Environmental Humanities, 12 (May 2020)
“Nature in ‘The Jungle’: Ethnic Workers, Environmental Inequalities, and Subaltern Cultures of Nature in Chicago's Packingtown,” in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Vol. 3 (Winter 2016).
“Nature in the City: Urban Environmental History and Central Park” in OAH Magzine of History (October 2011).
“Race and U.S. Environmental History,” in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Sackman (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2010).
“African Americans, Outdoor Recreation, and the 1919 Chicago Race Riot,” in "To Love the Wind and the Rain": Essays in African American Environmental History, ed. Dianne Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
Areas of Interest
Fisher is a committed teacher who enjoys cultivating a critical understanding of the past among his students. He teaches classes in U.S history, U.S. environmental history, history of food, and nature and visual culture. He has also taught the history thesis sequence required of all graduating seniors.