University of Toronto
Chris Parsons is an interdisciplinary historian of science and the environment in the French Atlantic World. He is working on Cultivating a New France: Knowledge, Empire and Environment in the French Atlantic World, 1600 – 1760, an expansion and revision of his dissertation completed at the University of Toronto in 2011. This project examines French encounters with American environments that became literal and figurative sites of imperial experimentation, places to imagine the possible contours of a French colonial empire and investigate the roots and persistence of American difference. In this and related projects, he has a longstanding interest in highlighting the contribution of indigenous peoples to the evolution of European and Euro-American environmental sciences.
Prior to his arrival at Northeastern, Chris Parsons was a Barra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (mceas.org).