Bob Morrissey specializes in the history of early America and the Atlantic world, American frontier and borderlands history, ethnohistory, and environmental history.  His first book tells the story of French colonists and Native peoples of the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The book is entitled, "Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in the Colonial Illinois Country, and it appears in the Early American Studies Series from University of Pennsylvania Press.  His next project is entitled "The Illinois and the Edge Effect: People, Environment, and Power in the Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands."  It is a study of the relationship between people and non-human nature in one of North America's most distinctive ecological and social frontiers from 1200 to 1850.  It is supported by fellowships by the Illinois Center for Advanced Study and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. An article from this project entitled "Climate, Ecology, and History in North America’sTallgrass Prairie Borderlands" is forthcoming in the journal Past & Present.

In 2018-2020, Bob will be the Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where he will lead an interdisciplinary team in programming, research, and curriculum development. In 2016-17, Bob was Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. From 2016-2021, he is a Conrad Humanities Scholar in LAS.

Outside of his work as a professor, Bob is chapter advisor for the Evans Scholar House at Illinois. He also helps to organize the Society of Colonial Wars' Colonial America Lecture Series at the Newberry Library in Chicago.