William Cronon

William Cronon is an environmental historian who holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale; and a DPhil (second PhD) from Oxford. Changes to the Land began as a seminar paper he wrote as a graduate student at Yale. It was published in 1983 and was Cronon’s first book. His first academic position was as a professor of history at Yale, where he received tenure. In 1991, he published his second book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, and the following year he coedited a volume entitled Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. He left Yale after 10 years in 1993, taking a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he still works today. In 1995 he published another book, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships along with many other honors and awards.