“New Haven Environmental History:
Imagining a City’s Future by Studying Its Past”
4:45pm-5:45pm, followed by a small reception
Yale Environmental Humanities invites you to a launch event for the New Haven Environmental History Project!
With Special Guests:
Edward Joyner (New Haven Board of Education)
Michael Morand (New Haven City Historian and Beinecke Library)
Colleen Murphy-Dunning (Urban Resources Initiative)
Moderated by Paul Sabin, Yale University
Humanities Quadrangle 134 (320 York Street)
*Free Registration Here*
The New Haven Environmental History Project explores the history of the built and natural environment of the New Haven, Connecticut region.
The free teaching website curates engaging and easily accessible historical materials organized around key themes in environmental history– water, energy, transportation, land use, and public health. The content includes historical photos, maps, textual documents, infographics, and other materials.
The New Haven Environmental History Project aims to connect students and faculty with the community and invite us all to think about why the New Haven region has developed the way that it has, and how it might change in the future.
At our launch event, our special guests will each speak briefly on a theme in New Haven’s history, drawing on an item from the new website, and we will invite attendees to join a conversation on topics and themes for teaching the environmental history of the city.
The New Haven Environmental History Project is supported with an Impact! grant from Yale Planetary Solutions.
*Free Registration Here*
Speaker Bios:
Edward Joyner is an elected member of the New Haven Board of Education, where he chairs the Teaching and Learning Committee and Facilities Naming Committee. He has been an assistant principal and principal of urban public schools and an assistant professor and administrator at the Yale Child Study Center, where he was Executive Director of the School Development Program at Yale. At Sacred Heart University, Dr. Joyner served as the Director of the Master of Arts in Education Program. He has trained educators and social policy makers throughout the U.S., is author of the Ebony Guide to Black Student Excellence, and has earned various awards. He is co-author of six books addressing the education of poor and/or minority children, including Rallying the Village and Child by Child, two of the best sellers at Columbia Teachers College Press. He is the lead author of the Field Guide to Comer Schools in Action that describes thirty-five years of work done by the staff of the School Development Program and its founder, Dr. James P. Comer. His M.A. in teaching is from Wesleyan University and his doctorate in school administration from the University of Bridgeport.
Michael Morand is Director of Community Engagement for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He was recently appointed to a five-year term as New Haven’s official city historian by Mayor Justin Elicker. Michael also is currently chair of the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery and serves on the boards of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the W. E. B. Du Bois Museum Foundation (USA/Ghana). He is the author of a chapter in Yale and Slavery: A History (2024) and has been a leader for the research of that book and the Yale and Slavery Research Project. He is co-curator of the related exhibition, Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, at the New Haven Museum (from February through summer 2024). Michael holds a bachelor and a master of divinity degree from Yale. He has been in the senior administration of Yale for three decades, with earlier roles including service as the university’s deputy chief communications officer and associate vice president for New Haven and state affairs.
Colleen Murphy-Dunning is the Director of both the
Hixon Center for Urban Ecology and the
Urban Resources Initiative at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). Colleen partners with faculty to lead a field based module on urban ecology for all incoming YSE graduate students. Prior to coming to New Haven in 1995, she taught agroforestry at the Kenya Forestry College and reviewed natural resource operations in Papua New Guinea for the Rainforest Action Network. Colleen received her B.S. in Public and Environmental Affairs from Indiana University, and M.S. in Forestry from Humboldt State University.
Paul Sabin is the Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches and writes about United States environmental history and energy politics. He is the faculty director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. Sabin is the author, most recently, of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (W.W. Norton, 2021), which examines the evolution and impact of the public interest and environmental movements in the United States since the 1960s. Sabin received his doctorate in American History from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent a postdoctoral year as Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at the Harvard Business School. He also served for nine years as the founding executive director of the non-profit Environmental Leadership Program, which has trained and supported a collaborative network of nearly 2,000 talented public leaders from higher education, government, businesses, and non-profit organizations.
