Robert Michael Morrissey

Bob Morrissey writes and teaches about early American frontier history and environmental history. His recent book is People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America. It is a study of the relationship between people and non-human nature in the tallgrass prairie region-- one of North America's most distinctive ecological and social frontiers-- from the deep past through the colonial period. For information about the book, read about it on Bob's website and watch this mini-documentary video.

In 2018-2020, Bob was Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where he led an interdisciplinary team in programming, research, and curriculum development. Click here for their group study, The Flatland Project, including Bob's essay "The Drains out of Town." In 2016-17, Bob was Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. From 2016-2021, he was a Conrad Humanities Scholar in LAS.

Bob also helped to create the Colonial American History Lecture Series at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which is now in its sixth year.

Bob is founding co-editor of the book series, Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes, a new interdisciplinary series from Michigan State University Press. He is also a member of Reclaiming Stories, a collaborative project to help revitalize knowledge and practices of hide painting and tattooing within Miami and Peoria Indigenous communities. This project is sponsored by the HWW initiative, and you can read about it here.

In teaching, Bob is working on collections-based teaching, guiding student research, and community engagement. His course on Colonial American history now features a major project on one special object in the UIUC collections; you can learn about it in this web exhibit and in this mini-documentary. In Spring 2024, Bob will lead a Humanities Research Lab on Midwestern environmental history.