Close
Robert Suits is a Lecturer in Environmental History at UCL since 2024. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago before holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Calgary and at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on energy, climate, and labor. His first book, The Hobo: An Environmental History, explores how migrant work in the industrial United States developed in response to energy transitions and climate disasters; he is also the lead researcher on a wide-ranging digital history project exploring energy transitions across U.S. history.
Major publications
- 'Hoboes, Wheat, and Climate Precarity,' Agricultural History (2023) 97 (1): 1–47. (Winner of the Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article from the American Society of Environmental History, 2024, and the Vernon Carstensen Prize for Best Article in the journal Agricultural History from the Agricultural History Society, 2024.)
- 'Beyond Rainmaking: Climate Engineering on the Nineteenth Century Great Plains,' Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 137–153
For more information, see Robert's RPS profile.
Public engagement/Outreach:
Robert is the lead researcher on an interdisciplinary digital history project to visualize energy use in American history. This produced a public-facing Sankey diagram for classroom and energy policy use. This project serves as a pedagogical resource, a new inventory of energy use, and a research effort with impacts that range well beyond academia. Future work will explore comparative energy histories, featuring animated Sankeys for other nations (with some early work pointing to Canada, the UK, and Canada). A second digital project, in its early stages, aims to produce historical maps of American energy infrastructure, of which an early version can be found here.
