Associate Professor of History
Research Areas: American history, environmental history, urban history, animal history, and the history of Boston
Andrew Robichaud teaches courses in American history, including courses related to environmental history, urban history, animal history, and the history of Boston. He specializes in nineteenth-century America.
Robichaud is the author of Animal City: The Domestication of America (Harvard, 2019). The book explores the central role of animal life and death in nineteenth-century cities, and traces a web of interconnected social, cultural, political, and environmental changes. Robichaud’s dissertation on the topic received the 2015 Michael Katz Award from the Urban History Association for best dissertation in urban history (no geographic restriction).
Robichaud’s next book project, tentatively titled On Ice: America’s Nineteenth-Century Ice Age and the Making of Modern Life, is a history of climate, ice, and the ice trade in North America, and explores the cultural and economic ice age in nineteenth-century America. An article from this project, Frozen Over: Making Ice and Knowing Nature in Nineteenth-Century America, appeared in the journal Environmental History in 2022.
Robichaud earned his B.A. from Brandeis University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University, where he was involved in digital and spatial history projects at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and the Spatial History Project.
Selected Publications:
The Animal City: Remaking Human and Animal Lives in Nineteenth-Century America
For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Robichaud’s Department Profile.