John R. McNeill Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service and History Department Washington DC 20057, USA mcneillj@georgetown.edu

J.R. McNeill was born in Chicago on October 6, 1954. He studied at Swarthmore College and Duke University, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1981. Since 1985 he has taught some 2,500 students at Georgetown University, in the History Department and School of Foreign Service, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs from 2003 until his appointment as University Professor in 2006. He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Otago and Canterbury, both in New Zealand. His research interests lie in environmental history generally, and of the Mediterranean world, the tropical Atlantic world, and Pacific islands in particular. He has held two Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has published more than 40 scholarly articles in professional and scientific journals. His books are The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 1700-1765 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Atlantic American Societies from Columbus through Abolition (co-edited, London: Routledge, 1992); The Mountains of the Mediterranean World (New York: Cambridge University Press); The Environmental History of the Pacific World (edited, London: Variorum, 2001); Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (New York: Norton, 2000), co-winner of the World History Association book prize, the Forest History Society book prize, and runner-up for the BP Natural World book prize, and translated into 6 languages; and most recently The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), co-authored with his father William H. McNeill and translated into 5 languages. He also co-edited the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (New York: Routledge, 2003); Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2006) with Verena Winiwarter; and Rethinking Environmental History (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007) together with Alf Hornborg and Joan Martinez Alier. He is currently working on a history of yellow fever in the Americas from the 17th to the 20th centuries and editing an environmental history of the Cold War.