Lauret Savoy

Professor of Geology & Environmental Studies

Specialization
How the layering of natural and cultural history creates what is experienced as "sense of place"; how humans have shaped and responded to images and ideas of natural landscapes in the American West; the impact of earth studies on the human environmental history of the Web.

Lauret Savoy believes that human history and natural history are braided strands of human existence. A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer, and pilot, Savoy challenges students to examine their assumptions about the world. She also is a woman of mixed African-American, Native American, and Euro-American heritage. In The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2002), which Savoy co-edited with poet Alison Deming, diverse writers of color explore "cultural hybridity and difference in human interactions with environment and place."  Savoy also co-edited Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press, 2006) with Eldridge and Judy Moores, as well as Living with the Changing California Coast (University of California Press, 2005) with Gary Griggs and Kiki Patsch.  She recently worked with the University of New England Press to re-issue Alien Land (E. P. Dutton, 1949), the long out-of-print novel on “Negro passing” written by her father Willard Wilson Savoy.

Savoy is one of eight women scientists nationwide featured on the award-winning CD-ROM, Telling Our Stories: Women in Science. Funded by the National Science Foundation and designed for elementary and middle school students, the presentation highlights women in science, past and present. The CD-ROM allows children to accompany Savoy to her research sites in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and American Southwest and perform an interactive experiment on fossils with her. The disc is a part of the Smithsonian Institution's permanent Science in American Life exhibition.

The recipient of numerous professional awards, Savoy teaches interdisciplinary courses on human-earth interactions through time (including Perspectives on American Environmental History and Evolution of North American Landscapes) and co-teaches, with English professor John Lemly, a course on nature writing (Reading and Writing in the World).

In 2005, Savoy became the new director of Mount Holyoke College’s Center for the Environment.

Read about her new books, Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology and Living with the Changing California Coast, as well as her father’s reprinted novel, Alien Land in the April 2006 Dean of Faculty Report.

News Links:

"The Future of Environmental Essay," Terrain.org, July 21, 2008

"Flood of Ideas at MHC's Quabbin Panel", Office of Communications, October 2, 2006

"MHC Prof's Book Makes WSJ "Five Best" List", Office of Communications, August 4, 2006

"MHC Innovation Fund Grant Winners Announced", Office of Communications, May 1, 2006

"Professors Benfey, Cobb, Nicholson, and Savoy Honored with Faculty Awards," College Street Journal, April 25, 2003

"CD Featuring Lauret Savoy Tells Girls about Women Scientists," College Street Journal, December 13, 2006