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College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award

Paul Sutter, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been named the 2024 College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.

The college presents this prestigious award annually to current faculty members who are scholars and artists of national and international renown and who are recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent. Honorees hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

“Being named a Professor of Distinction is a career honor, and I am deeply appreciative of my wonderful colleagues in the History Department who nominated me for this award, and those around campus who supported my nomination,” Sutter notes.

Sutter’s research focus is U.S. and global environmental history. He is the author of (2002) and  (2015).

CU Boulder Professor Paul Sutter is the author of many accalimed essays and books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South. 

In Driven Wild, Sutter details an aspect of his longtime intellectual fascination with wilderness and U.S. environmental history: “Historians had long studied the centrality of the wilderness idea in American history, from its importation as a filter for viewing the colonial landscape to its role as a shibboleth of the postwar environmental movement, and I was fascinated by the same questions that preoccupied many of these scholars: How was it that a nation founded upon an antipathy for the wilderness had come to cherish and protect it? What had produced this intellectual and cultural sea change?”

In addition, Sutter is the co-author of  (with Leon Neel and Albert Way, 2010), and the co-editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009) and Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast (with Paul Pressly, 2018).

His current book project, Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-1914, is an environmental and public health history of the construction of the Panama Canal.

In addition to his books, Sutter has also written a number of influential essays on environmental historiography, including a state-of-the-field essay in the Journal of American History (June 2013), and he is the series editor for , published by the University of Washington Press. He has received major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health,  the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the National Humanities Center. 

Sutter earned his BA in American studies from Hamilton College and his PhD from the University of Kansas. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia from 1997 to 2000 and a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2009. He joined CU Boulder as an associate professor of history in 2009 and was named professor in 2016.

Sutter served as Department of History chair from 2017-2021. He is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Studies and in the Center of the American West, and he has just joined the Advisory Board of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

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