A writer, teacher, photographer, and pilot, Lauret Savoy considers the complex intertwinings of “natural” and cultural histories. Her book “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape” explores how this nation’s ever-unfolding history has marked the land and this society. Her other books include “The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World”; “Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology”; and “Living with the Changing California Coast”. Trace won the American Book Award and other honors; it was also a finalist for PEN American and additional awards. Bedrock was named one of the “Five Best” science books in the Wall Street Journal.
Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Savoy has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation, and she is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. Senior classes have chosen Savoy to be a Baccalaureate speaker and Final (or Last) Lecturer.
Savoy served as the director of Mount Holyoke’s Miller Worley Center for the Environment, and she is on the Board of Directors of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and other non-profit organizations.
Areas of Expertise
The complex twining of “natural” and cultural histories that have marked North American landscapes and the people in them; the place of race in American environmental history; images and ideas of the land
Education
- Ph.D., Syracuse University
- M.S., University of California, Santa Cruz
- A.B., Princeton University
