Finis Dunaway

Professor
B.A. (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Ph.D. (Rutgers University)
Phone: 705-748-1011 ext. 7026
Email: finisdunaway@trentu.ca
 

Research Interests

• United States, Canadian, &Global Environmental History 
• Media & Visual Culture 
• The American West 
• Arctic History 

Books

Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

Awards:

• Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction Book, Western Writers of America
• Hal K. Rothman Award for Best Book in Western Environmental History, Western History Association 
• Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize for Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing, Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada

     Public History Website: https://defendingthearcticrefuge.com/

Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Awards: 

• John G. Cawelti Award, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
• AEJMC History Division Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
• Robert K. Martin Book Prize, Canadian Association for American Studies

Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; paperback, 2008).

Selected Articles

• “Representations, Traces, Vital Agents: Why Images Matter to Environmental History,” Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History 16 (October 2023): 623-632.
• “Did one photograph change the fate of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge?” Washington Post, March 3, 2023.
• “Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice,” (co-authored with Subhankar Banerjee), Environmental History 28 (January 2023): 180-207.
• “Seeing Beyond Borders: Grassroots Visual Culture and the Struggle to Protect the Arctic Refuge,” in Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective, ed. Karl Kusserow (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2021), 240-259.
• “Indigenous Advocacy Transformed the Fight over Oil Drilling in the Arctic Refuge,” Washington Post, March 14, 2021.
• “Our House Is on Fire: Children, Youth, and the Visual Politics of Climate Change,” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, ed. T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee (New York: Routledge, 2021), 428-436.
• “Reconsidering the Sublime: Images and Imaginative Geographies in American Environmental History,” in The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States, ed. Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yolonda Youngs (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 277-294.
• “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement,” Chicago Tribune, November 23, 2017.
• “Dr. Spock Is Worried: Visual Media and the Emotional History of American Environmentalism,” in Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics, ed. Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S.K. Young (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 138-161.
• “Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and the Aesthetics of Ecological Citizenship,” in Reframing the New Topographics, ed. Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbach (Chicago: Center for AmericanPlaces, 2010), 13-43.
• “Cultures of Nature: Twentieth Century,” in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 266-284.
• “Seeing Global Warming: Contemporary Art and the Fate of the Planet,” Environmental History 14 (January 2009): 9-31. [Reprinted in Future Climate Change, ed. Mark Maslin and Samuel Randalls (New York: Routledge, 2011), vol. IV, 391-414.]
• “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 67-99.
• “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” American Quarterly 58 (March 2006): 159-180. [Reprinted in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 254-274.]