John Brooke

Professor John Brooke is the director of the OSU Center for Historical Research and co-chair of the 2011-2012 Program: Disease, Health, and Environment in Global History. He received his B.A. from Cornell University (1975) and his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania, and between 1981 and 2001 taught at Franklin and Marshall, Amherst, and Tufts before coming to The Ohio State University. He was named an O.S.U. Humanities Distinguished Professor in September 2003. In 2007-2008 he served as the president of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. Brooke teaches early American history and global environmental history at Ohio State.

Brooke is the author of three prize-winning books: The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713-1861(Cambridge University Press, 1989); The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Columbia: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson, was published in 2010 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.

He is completing a book manuscript on the long material and natural history of the human condition entitled "A Rough Journey: Human History and a Volatile Earth," under contract with Cambridge University Press.