Brian Allen Drake

Brian Allen Drake specializes in environmental history, a discipline which explores the intricate ways in which nature has affected human history and vice versa. His research focuses on the postwar American environmental movement, particularly its relationship to postwar politics and ideology. He also has a keen interest in the environmental history of the American Civil War and in the history of epidemics. The University of Washington Press published his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan, in August 2013 in its Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series. He is also the editor of The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, published by UGA Press in January 2015. Drake has published articles in Great Plains Quarterly, the Georgia Historical Quarterly, and Environmental History as well as chapters in several edited volumes. His current research focuses on the 1918 influenza epidemic and its impact on the state of Georgia. During the 2015-16 academic year, Drake was one of the UGA Library's inaugural Special Collections Library Fellows, and in 2017 he was one of the inaugural Fellows for Innovative Teaching with UGA's Center for Teaching and Learning. In May 2016 he was the first-ever recipient of the Amanda and Greg Gregory Undergraduate Teaching Award, and in 2019 received the Park-Heggoy Graduate Faculty Teaching Award.  Prior to arriving at UGA in 2007, Drake taught for two years in the Humanities and Western Civilization program at the University of Kansas. He earned his B.A. in history at the University of Michigan, his M.A. in U.S. history at the University of Georgia, and his PhD. in history at the University of Kansas.