UW regents name Cronon Vilas Professor

William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies, has received one of the UW–Madison’s most prestigious honors.

The UW Board of Regents has approved Cronon’s appointment as a Vilas Professor. Created to advance learning, Vilas Professorships are awarded to faculty members whose research is recognized as exceptional nationally and internationally. Cronon, a UW–Madison alumnus who earned his bachelor’s degree here, has pioneered interdisciplinary research in the study of environmental history. He focuses on past human interactions with the natural world: how people use the ecosystems they inhabit, how they modify the landscapes around them and how their ideas of nature shape the environment.

The author or editor of more than 20 books, Cronon is perhaps best known for “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” (1991), which examines the city of Chicago’s relationship to the hinterlands during the second half of the 19th century. The book was awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for best literary work of nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize for best work of American history. In addition, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society. It also was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history.

The other main book in Cronon’s canon is “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England” (1983), a study of how landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Native peoples to Europeans. The Society of American Historians awarded the book, Cronon’s first, the Francis Parkman Prize in 1984. In addition to his own books, he served as editor of “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature” (1995) and was co-editor of “Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past” (1992). He continues to edit the University of Washington’s Weyerhaeuser environmental book series. He currently is completing “Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism” and is working on a history of Portage, Wis.

In addition to his research, Cronon has been instrumental in developing UW–Madison’s learning communities on campus as founder and faculty director of Chadbourne Residential College. He also has served as director of the College of Letters and Science Honors Program. He won a UW–Madison Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000.

Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow and MacArthur Fellow. In addition to his B.A. from UW–Madison, he holds an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He has been on the UW–Madison faculty since 1992.