Christopher Sellers

Christopher Sellers is a professor of history at Stony Brook University in New York, and as of summer 2016, Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice.  His research concentrates on the history of environment and health, of cities and industries, and of inequality and democracy, with a focus on the United States and Mexico.  He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina; among his numerous grants, fellowships, and awards are those from the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine. 

He began his career studying the environmental and health histories of industrialization and of institutional bulwarks such as medicine and the corporation, which led to works such as Hazards of the Job (1997);  (with Christine Rosen) “The Nature of the Firm”  (1999); and (edited with Gregg Mitman and Michelle Murphy) Landscapes of Exposure (2003).  He then studied the ties between sub/urbanization and thoes experiences, movements, expertise and politics characterized as “environmental,” resulting in Crabgrass Crucible (2012) and a forthcoming book on Atlanta, which also steps back to ask questions about inequality and democracy.  At the Wilson Center he is writing up his latest depature, Toxic Crossings, an in-depth comparative and transnational study of the history of industrial hazards in Mexico and the United States from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. 

Recently stepping in as Director of Stony Brook’s Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice, he has also led the founding of a History of Environment and Health Network (HEHN) and H-EnviroHealth, a new H-Net Network he currently a co-edits.

Website, “Stories of Environmental Danger and Disaster,” containing witness seminars and other testimony from Toxic Crossings project

Website for Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (2012)

Facebook Page for Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World (2011)

ResearchGate page with accessible publications