Paul Gregory Nauert

I teach & write about American history & climate (in)justice

A road between burned and unburned forest, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, California / Wašišiw Ɂítdeʔ (Washoe) and Me-Wuk (Central Sierra Miwok) land, April 2021, photo by Paul G. Nauert

Learn more about the history and present of Indigenous communities where you live through the Indigenous-led Native Digital Lands mapping project

Who I am & what I do

I am a queer American historian, teacher, writer, and community-builder.

My work engages questions of power, justice, and socio-environmental change from the local to the planetary scale involving American choices in the twentieth-century world.

1936 map by Richard Edes Harrison showing social, ecological, & commodites data overlaid several maps of Japan, from the David Rumsey Center collection

Dissertation & book project: Climate Crucible

Choices by American foreign policymakers in the 1940s shaped trajectories of climate change and the planetary politics of climate (in)justice. The consequences of their choices are still unfolding.

By comparing American debates on industrialization and resource use in occupied Germany and Japan, I trace a new story of American global power and responsibility linking the acceleration of climate change and the origins of the Cold War. Learn more.

July 1969 image of a U.S. aircraft spraying chemical defoliant weapons over forest in the Mekong Delta, available from the U.S. National Archive & Records Administration

Teaching

My award-winning teaching has included topics in modern American, Japanese, Southeast Asian, and global history as well as the ethics of war and interdisciplinary approaches to climate justice studies.

Explore some of my teaching materials.

Image of a rainbow taken by Paul G. Nauert

Community-focused work

Community-building, service, mentorship, public history, and paying it forward are integral to my practice as a historian.

Learn more my community-focused work.

1946 map by Paul Sample showing commodities & commodity-production labor connected to each U.S. state, from the David Rumsey Center collection

Other work & current learning

Additional research, teaching, and writing interests of mine focus on intertwined patterns of labor, land use, commodities, race, gender, and class in the twentieth-century U.S., California, and the wider Pacific world.

Learn more about what I've worked on and am currently learning.

I'd love to hear from you

Interested in my work, inviting me to speak, exploring a collaboration, or sharing a relevant job opportunity?