Email
jcullon@wpi.edu
Office
SL 236
Phone
+1 (508) 8315000 x5919
Education
B.S. Natural Resources Cornell University 1991
M.S. Environmental Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison 1995
M.A History University of Wisconsin, Madison 1998
Ph.D. History University of Wisconsin, Madison 2003

One of Professor Cullon's students recently called him "strangely fascinating." He knew that he was strange but he was happy to learn that a student found his approach to teaching fascinating. He likes to encourage students to see history not as a mass of dead facts but as a vital mode of inquiry and a moral project that has the potential to inform the present as much as illuminate the past. Having previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dartmouth College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he finds teaching WPI students especially invigorating because of their abiding curiosity and diligence. Professor Cullon received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003.  He has twice served as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, first at the American Antiquarian Society (2005-2006) and then with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary (2008-2009).  Professor Cullon works across the boundaries of early American social, economic, environmental and technological history.  Presently, he is completing revisions to his first monograph, Work upon the Ark: New England Shipbuilding and the Launching of the British Maritime Empire (under contract with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Imprint of the University of North Carolina Press). In this manuscript, Professor Cullon breaks down the too often dichotomous pairing of land and water in Atlantic history to reveal that English colonial development was an amphibious affair.  In addition, Wiley-Blackwell will soon publish his documents collection on the American Revolution as part of its "Uncovering the Past" series.

Scholarly Work

Era of the American Revolution: A History in Documents (London and Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming, December 2014)

“A River Transformed, A Valley Remade,” in Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Hanover: University Press of New England for the Worcester Historical Museum, 2009).

Review Essay, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domesticated Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press,2004) and Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). New England Quarterly (Winter 2005).

“Legacies and Limitations: Environmental Historians Reconsider Progressive Conservation,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2002).

Professional Highlights & Honors
, 2005
American Antiquarian Society
, 2008
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture