Professional Affiliation

University Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Expert Bio

John McNeill is University Professor at Georgetown University and an expert on international environmental history. McNeill holds dual appointments in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and its Department of History. Prior to being named university professor, he was the Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environment and International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service. McNeill has also taught at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland and at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received both his master’s and doctorate from Duke University.

McNeill’s academic career is studded with numerous awards and fellowship opportunities including the American Historical Association’s 2011 Albert J. Beveridge Award for his most recent publication. In 2010, he won the Toynbee Prize for academic and public contributions to humanity. He is the president of the American Society for Environmental History, and has held fellowships with the MacArthur Foundation Program on Global Security and Sustainability, the Guggenheim Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and Fulbright Foundation.

In addition to numerous journal articles and essays, McNeill is the author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1640-1914 and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World, which won the World History Association Book Prize and the Weyerhaeuser Book Prize.  His other books include The Human Web, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History and The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763.