Dr. Kirsten Greer
As a critical historical geographer, she is interested in human-environment relations in the past; the historical geographies of the environmental sciences; the colonial afterlives of the British Empire; and the politics of biodiversity heritage. She is the author of Red Coats and Wilds Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Areas of Specialization:
Cultural and historical geography, critical geopolitics, environmental history, political ecology, geographies of science
Research Interests:
Networks of empire, science, and nature; imperial geopolitics; environmental histories of the British Empire; colonial afterlives of imperial knowledge; politics of biodiversity heritage
Current & Future Research:
Zoogeography and empire; militarization of the North Atlantic; environmental histories of the “Near North”; geopolitics of the Gulf Stream
Greer, K. (forthcoming) Red Coats and Wild Birds: Empire, Science, Nature in the new book series, “Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges,” University of North Carolina Press.
Smith, A. & Greer, K. (2017) Uniting business history and global environmental history. Special Issue for Business History 59, 7: 987-1009
Greer K. & Bols S. (2016) ‘She of the Loghouse Nest’: Gendering Historical Ecological Reconstructions in Northern Ontario. Special issue on Feminist Historical Geography in Historical Geography 44: 45-67
Smith A. & Greer, K. (2016) Race, Britishness, and the 1866 British North American Trade Mission to the West Indies and Brazil. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, 2: 214-240
Greer, K. & Cameron L. (2015) Introduction: The use and abuse of ecological constructs. Special Issue for Geoforum (October): 451-453
Greer, K. (2015) Maritime zoogeography and imperial defence: tracing the contours of the Nearctic region in the British North Atlantic 1838-1880. Special issue in Geoforum (October): 454-464
Greer, K. (2013) Geopolitics and the avian imperial archive: the zoogeography of region-making in the late 19th-century British Mediterranean. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103: 1317-1331.
Greer, K. (2012) Untangling the avian imperial archive. Antennae:The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Special issue on Alternative Ornithologies 20: 59-71.
Cameron, L. and Greer, K. (2012) The Translocal Ecologies Compendium, Network in Canadian History and Environment. http://niche-canada.org/workship
Greer, K. (2009) Ornithology on “the Rock”: territory, fieldwork, and the body in the Straits of Gibraltar in the mid-nineteenth century. Historical Geography 37: 26-52.
Greer, K. and Cameron, L. (2005) ‘Swee-ee-et, Can-a-da, Can-a-da, Can-a-da’: sensuous landscapes of birdwatching in the eastern provinces, 1900-1939. Material History Review 62: 35-48.