KU News Release

Donald E. Worster

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More Information

• Department of History
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Full list of inductees

LAWRENCE — Internationally renowned historian Donald E. Worster, the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 10 in Cambridge, Mass.

One of the nation’s most prestigious honor societies, the academy recognizes pioneering research and scholarship, artistic achievement and exemplary service to society.

Worster was among 212 new fellows and 19 foreign honorary members elected this year. New members included Mario Capecchi, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology, and Robert Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense.

A pioneer in the field of environmental history — the history of the interaction of people and the natural world — Worster has been described as “one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West.”

According to academy records, Worster is the third KU faculty member to be elected to membership. Charles D. Michener, professor emeritus of entomology, was elected to the academy in 1963; and Keith W. Percival, professor emeritus of linguistics, was elected in 1991.

Worster focuses on the emerging field of environmental history — the changing perception of nature, the rise of conservation and environmentalism and especially the ways that the natural world has impinged on human society and provided the context for human life over time. His interests include comparative history especially the United States and Canada, American regionalism (particularly the West), agriculture and the history of science and technology.

In addition to teaching and advising dissertations in environmental history, Worster is author of several books and has received numerous awards for his writing and research.

His most recent books are “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir,” (2008) and “A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell” (2001). Both books were published by Oxford University Press and received Byron Caldwell Smith Book Awards at KU. “A Passion for Nature” received the 2009 Ambassador Book Award, and “A River Running West” received the 2002 Caughey Western History Association Prize and seven more prizes.

Worster’s earlier writing includes “Rivers of Empire” (1985), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; “The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s” (1979), which won the national Bancroft Prize; and “Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas” (1994, second edition) now available in five languages.

He is former president of the American Society for Environmental History and a member of the American Society for Environmental History, Western History Association and the Organization of American Historians. In 1997, Worster was the first historian to receive a Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology. At KU, he has received a Kemper fellowship for teaching excellence and a Balfour Jeffrey Award for research achievement in the humanities. Over the past two decades he has lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as throughout North America.

Worster joined KU’s history department in 1989 when he accepted the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professorship in American History. Born in California in 1941, he grew up in Hutchinson and attended KU, where he earned a bachelor’s in 1963 and a master’s in 1964. He received a doctorate in American history and literature at Yale University in 1971.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Current academy research focuses on science and technology policy; global security; social policy; the humanities and culture; and education.