Dr. Jason Colby
Position
Contact
Credentials
BA (Whitman), MA, PhD (Cornell)
Area of expertise
Environmental History, Pacific Coast History, Humans and Climate Change, Modern American History, US International Relations
Bio
I was born in Victoria and grew up along the Pacific Coast, mostly in Puget Sound in Washington State. During my high school and undergraduate years, I worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and on fish farms in Puget Sound. I also studied abroad in Central America. Before entering graduate school, I taught history and English in Taiwan, worked at a land-use law firm in Seattle, and travelled throughout the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. I earned my PhD from Cornell University in 2005 and taught at the University of Texas at El Paso before coming to the 糖心视频 in 2007. I teach and write on environmental history and US international history with a particular interest in the historical interactions of humans and whales in the North Pacific. My third book, Devilfish: The History and Future of Gray Whales and People is forthcoming with University of Washington Press in 2027. Currently, I am working on an environmental history of the world through the lens of sperm whales and elephants entitled Sperms and Pachyderms: A Terraqueous History.
Project Websites
April 2023:
Selected publications
Books
Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator (Oxford University Press, 2018)
The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2011)
- Honourable mention, Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
- Honourable mention, Ralph Gomory Prize, Business History Conference
Recent articles and chapters
“Tuffy’s Cold War: Science, Memory, and the US Navy’s Dolphin,” Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History (University of Calgary Press, 2022).
“Swimming with Gigi: Captivity, Gray Whales, and the Environmental Culture of the Pacific Coast,” Across Species and Cultures: Whales, Humans, and Pacific Worlds (University of Hawaii Press, (2022).
“Learning to Love the Sea Wolves,” Spirits of the Coast: Orcas in Science, Art, and History (Royal BC Museum, 2020).
“Conscripting Leviathan: Science, Cetaceans, and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History (June 2020).
Interviews and Public Events
Digital Articles
Courses
| HSTR 100 | History, Power, and Justice |
| HSTR 101E | Environmental History of the World |
| HSTR 201 | Introduction to Historical Research |
| HSTR 210A | The United States to the Civil War |
| HSTR 210B | The United States since 1865 |
| United States since 1945 | |
| HSTR 307A | The United States in the World, 1750 - 1914 |
| HSTR 307B | The United States in the World, 1914 - present |
| HSTR 410 | Seminar in American History |
| HSTR 471 | Seminar in Thematic and Comparative History |
Grad students
In progress
Ayla LaPierre, "Making a Living in Robson Bight: Humans, Orcas, and a Shared Ecosystem”
Jared Mavretic, "Southern Cultural Memory during Reconstruction, 1865-1877”
Timothy Cunningham, “‘Every Year is Therefore a Separate Problem’: Fisheries, Forestry, and the Future of Salish Sea Sockeye”
- Winner of SSHRC Doctoral Award
Completed
Ella Cathcart, "Race, Gender, and the Development of Alberta's Tar Sands” (MA, 2023)
Rachel Schneider, “‘Expansion is too Clean a Name for it’: Black Perspectives on American Imperial Expansion, 1898-1902” (MA, 2023)
Aimee Richard, “Whale Watching in the City” (MA, Public History, 2022)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Gordon Lyall, “Turning the Tide: Clams and Colonialism in the Salish Sea, 1925-1994” (PhD, 2022)
- Winner of SSHRC Doctoral Award
Timothy Cunningham, “Beasts in the Garden City: Animals, Humans, and Settlement on Canada’s West Coast” (MA, 2021)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Kelly J. Clark, Happy Endings (documentary film)(MA, Public History, 2018)
Adam Kostrich, “The Imperial Species: Masculinity and Necropolitics in Frank Buck’s Writings” (MA, 2018)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Isobel Griffin, “Managing the Entertainment: Marine Mammal Technologies at Marineland of the Pacific” (MA, 2018)
Jake Sherman, "'A Ship on the Waves of the Zeitgeist:' An Oral History of the Georgia Straight, 1967 – 1973” (MA, 2018)
Blake Butler, “Fishing on Porpoise: The Origins and Early Years of the Tuna-Dolphin Controversy” (MA, 2017)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Sheila Hamilton, “Panamanian Politics and Panama’s Relations with the United States Leading Up to the Hull-Alfaro Treaty” (MA, 2014)
Matt Logan, “‘We Say All the Real Things. And We Believe Them’: The Establishment of the United States Information Agency 1953” (MA, 2012)
Carlee Johnson, “Remembering ‘the American Island of Oahu’: Hawai'i Under Military Rule 1941-1945” (MA, 2011)
Jackson Todd, “Politics, Ideals, and Religion: Abraham Lincoln and the Growth to Emancipation 1860-1863” (MA, 2009)
Rob Douglas, “‘Being Successfully Nasty’: The United States, Cuba and State-Sponsored Terrorism” (MA, 2008)