About

Brian Hamilton is a historian, writer, teacher, and podcaster. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Under the direction of William Cronon and Stephen Kantrowitz, he is writing a dissertation entitled "Cotton's Keepers: Black Agricultural Expertise in Slavery and Freedom," a social and environmental history of African Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley across the nineteenth century.

He is an experienced teacher at both the secondary and post-secondary level. He is currently chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy, where he teaches courses on U.S. history, the history of capitalism, environmental justice, and political science. At Wisconsin, he worked as a teaching assistant for eight semesters in History, Environmental Studies, and Community and Environmental Sociology, and designed a new course, "Race and the Environment in the History of the United States," which he taught in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Before beginning graduate school, he taught for four years in the History Department at the Cambridge School of Weston. He also oversaw the training of first-time teachers for three years at Wisconsin and two summers at the EXPLO program at Wellesley College.

His digital work includes his tenure as managing editor of the digital magazine Edge Effects and as lead author of the online exhibit and digital archive Gaylord Nelson and Earth Day: The Making of the Modern Environmental Movement. He also created the Edge Effects podcast and serves as a host of the podcast New Books in Environmental Studies. 

Hamilton earned his B.A. in American Studies at Columbia University and grew up in Maine. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his partner and two children.