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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY > People > John Soluri

John Soluri

Associate Professor
Ph.D.: University of Michigan, 1998
Department Member Since: 1999

Biography

Professor Soluri's research and teaching explore the relationship between social and environmental change in Latin America with a particular focus on the commodification of biological organisms. He is currently researching and writing a book centered on animals, markets, borders, and environmental change in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego (1800-2000). His book, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (2005) won the George Perkins Marsh award for best book awarded by the American Society for Environmental History. He is a founding member of SOLCHA, the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History and a board member of Building New Hope, a Pittsburgh-based NGO promoting fair trade, small-scale agriculture and education in the Americas.

selected Publications

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
Recipient of the George Perkins Marsh Award for best book in environmental history, awarded by the American Society for Environmental History
“History's Freaks of Nature,” Environmental History (Jan. 2005).
“Bananas, Biodiversity, and the Paradox of Commodification,” Latin American Environmental Histories, Christian Brannstrom, ed. (London: Institute for Latin American Studies, 2004).
“People, Plants and Pathogens: The Eco-social Dynamics of Export Banana Production in Honduras, 1875-1950,” Hispanic American Historical Review v. 80, n 2 (August, 2000).
“Consumo de masas, biodiversidad y fitomejoamiento del banano de exportaicn, 1920 a 1980,” Revista de Historia (December, 2002).
“Accounting for Taste: Bananas, Mass Markets, and Panama Disease,” Environmental History 7:3 (July, 2002).
“A la sombra del bananal: poquiteros y transformaciones ecologicos en la Costa Norte, Honduras, 1870s-1940s,” Mesoamerica 42 (December, 2001).

Courses Taught

Advanced Seminar in Global Studies
Global Histories: Latin America and Global Environmental Change
Food, Culture, and Power: A History of Eating
Energy, Environment, Globalization in the Americas
Bananas, Baseball, and Borders: A History of Latin America-U.S. Relations
Theory and Practice in History and Policy
History and Policy Project Course

Contact Info

Department of History
Baker Hall 363
P: 412.268.7122
F: 412.268.1019
jsoluri@andrew.cmu.edu

Publications