Dr. Michael Egan is the director of the Sustainable Future History Project and an assistant professor in the Department of History at McMaster University.  He received his Ph.D. in environmental history in 2004 from Washington State University, and arrived at McMaster a year later after a stop at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, where he was the 2004-2005 John C. Haas Research Fellow.

    Dr. Egan’s research lies at the intersection of the history of science, technology, and the environment.  In 2007, he published Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism with the MIT Press.  In 2008, Routledge published Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism, a collection of original essays that he co-edited with Dr. Jeff Crane (Sam Houston State University).

    In addition to developing the Sustainable Future History Project, he is also at work on a book-length study on the history of knowing and regulating mercury pollution in the global environment since World War II, while also playing with a project that examines the emergence of a public or vernacular science of the environmental crisis in the United States.  With Adam Sowards, he is collaborating on a history of invasion ecologies, and with Jody Roberts, he is working on a history of enthusiasm for alternative energy technologies during periods of economic downturn in the United States.