Research Profiles

Jonathan Lande

Jonathan Lande joins Purdue University as an assistant professor (American Civil War) of history. Jonathan earned his Ph.D. at Brown University in 2018. His dissertation won the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History.  

Before joining Purdue, he taught at Weber State University, and he was the Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Historical Society and the New School and the Brown-Tougaloo Exchange Faculty Fellow at Tougaloo College. He teaches courses in American history and, for his pedagogy, received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brown University.  

Lande is currently completing a manuscript exploring the desertions and mutinies of formerly enslaved men in the Union Army and their trials in the military justice system during the Civil War. 

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Frederick Rowe Davis

Frederick Rowe Davis is Professor of History and the R. Mark Lubbers Chair in the History of Science. He studied the history of science and medicine at Harvard, the University of Florida, and Yale where he received his Ph.D. His research interests lie at the intersection of the history of environmental science, environmental health, and environmental history. Davis recently published Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology (Yale University Press, 2014). He also wrote The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology (Oxford University Press, 2007).

His current research projects include “Making Silent Spring,” a study of how Rachel Carson wrote her bestselling exposé of the ecological and health risks of chemical pesticides. He is also writing on the continued role of the organism in biology as science has focused on the gene and the molecule as the key elements of life.

Davis comes to Purdue following a distinguished tenure at Florida State University, where he taught courses in the history of science, the history of disease and public health, and environmental history. He has supervised four doctoral students and sixteen master’s students. At Purdue his teaching roster will include “Science & Society in Western Civilization,” “Environmental History of the United States,” “Science & Society in the Twentieth Century,” and a graduate seminar in global environmental history, as well as courses in the history of life sciences and the history of environmental sciences.

Davis spent the academic year 2016-2017 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on a Fulbright Scholar’s Award. He previously taught at Florida State University, where he co-created the Program for the History and Philosophy of Science.

He has a son in high school and divides his free time between birdwatching and distance running.