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William Meyer

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wmeyer

William Meyer

Professor of Geography; Chair, Department of Geography

Department/Office Information

Geography
323 Ho Science Center
  • M 10:30am - 11:30am (323 Ho Science Center)
  • T 1:30pm - 2:30pm (323 Ho Science Center)
  • W 10:30am - 11:30am (323 Ho Science Center)
  • R 2:00pm - 3:00pm (323 Ho Science Center)

BA, Williams College, 1983; PhD, Clark University, 1990

Environmental change, hazards and resources, environmental history

Human geography, cities, climate-society relations, nature-society relations, environmental history, northeastern United States.

  • Meyer, W. B., The Great Murdering-Heir Case: A Biography of Riggs v. Palmer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming).
  • Meyer, W. B., forthcoming, “Nature, Society, and Conjoint Constitution,” Geographical Review.
  • Meyer, W. B., forthcoming, “‘No Quixotry in Redress of Grievances’: How Community Abatement of Public Nuisances Disappeared from American Law,” Law and History Review.
  • Meyer, W. B., “Class, Conservation, and the Police Power in the American Gilded Age: The Origins of Lawton v. Steele,” American Journal of Legal History 62 (2022), 215-236.
  • Meyer, W. B., “Borderlands of the Local State,” Political Geography 92 (2022): 102498 (9 pp.).
  • Meyer, W. B., “The Background to Riggs v. Palmer,” American Journal of Legal History 60 (2020), 48-75.
  • Meyer, W. B., “First Effective Settlement: Histories of an Idea,” Journal of Historical Geography 65 (2019), 1-8.
  • Meyer, W. B., “Urban Primacy before Mark Jefferson,” Geographical Review 109 (2019), 131-145.
  • Neo-Environmental Determinism: Geographical Critiques (with Dylan M.T. Guss '14) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
  • The Progressive Environmental Prometheans: Left-Wing Heralds of a ‘Good Anthropocene’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
  • "The Suburban Bias of American Society?" (with Jessica K. Graybill), Urban Geography 37 (2016), 863-882
  • Americans and Their Weather: A History, updated edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).
  • The Environmental Advantages of Cities: Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).
  • “Burgess and Hoyt in Los Angeles: Testing the Chicago Models in an Automotive-Age American City” (with Christopher R. Esposito ’14), Urban Geography 36 (2015), 314-325.
  • “Residential Patterns in the Pre-Automotive American City” (with Christopher R. Esposito ’14), Geographical Review 104 (2014), 346-60.
  • “The Making and Unmaking of a Natural Resource: The Salt Industry of Coastal Southeastern Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013), 123-50.
  • Meyer, W.B., “Hills as Resources and Resistances in Syracuse, New York,” Geographical Review 102 (2012), 1-16.
  • “A City (Only Partly) on a Hill,” in Conrad E. Wright and Anthony Penna, eds., Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
  • “Boston’s Weather and Climate Histories,” in Conrad E. Wright and Anthony Penna, eds., Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Associate, Belfer Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 1997-2003; Research Associate, Clark University 1987-1996