Department of History - Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty

John Soluri

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

Professor Soluri's research and teaching explore the relationship between social and environmental change in Latin America. His book, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, examines the relationship between the mass consumption of a tropical commodity (bananas) in the United States, and environmental and social change in Honduras during the late 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently on leave in Santiago, Chile where he is carrying out research on animals, commodity markets, and geopolitics in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Professor Soluri is a founding member of SOLCHA, the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History and is presently an Associate Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review. He is also involved with Pittsburgh-based organizations promoting human rights, fair trade, and alternative agriculture in the Americas.

Publications

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/solban.html

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).