Ellen Spears, Ph.D. Math and Science Center 5th floor E528 400 Dowman Drive Atlanta, GA 30322 espears@emory.edu Telephone: 404-727-4252 Fax: 404-727-4448

Dr. Ellen Griffith Spears taught American Studies as a visiting assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University during 2006-7, and now teaches courses in Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies. Her scholarly publications include a chapter in Emerging Illnesses and Society, edited by Randall M. Packard, Peter J. Brown, Ruth L. Berkelman, and Howard Frumkin, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and a chapter in The American South in a Global World, edited by James L. Peacock, Harry L. Watson, and Carrie R. Matthews, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. A new essay, “Reducing Environmental Burdens: A Southern Agenda,” appears in American Crisis, Southern Perspectives: From Where We Stand, Promise or Peril, publishedin 2008 by NewSouth Books.  Her first book, The Newtown Story: One Community’s Fight for Environmental Justice (1998), a collaborative documentary project, is a concise journalistic account of the civil rights and environmental work of the Newtown Florist Club in Gainesville, Georgia.

Formerly associate director of the Southern Regional Council, the Atlanta-based civil rights research institute, Spears served as managing editor of the SRC’s quarterly journal, Southern Changes, for a decade. Dr. Spears served as a contributing writer for “The Case for Extending and Amending the Voting Rights Act,” with Laughlin McDonald and Daniel Levitas, on a report prepared for Congress and presented to the House Committee on the Judiciary in March 2006, during reauthorization of key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

As a Mellon Teaching Fellow in 2004-5, she taught environmental history and southern history at Agnes Scott College. She has a Ph.D. from Emory University and a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Her research is broadly interdisciplinary, combining civil rights and environmental history, social justice theory, and studies of science, technology, and public health.

Courses Offered

ENVS 225: Institutions and the Environment
ENVS 350SWR: Environmental Thought: Ethics, Philosophy and Issues
ENVS 385S: Life on the Mississippi: The Cultural and Natural Ecology of the Mississippi River
ENVS 385S: Comparative Ecologies: United States and South Africa
ENVS 385S: Gender, Justice and the Environment
ENVS 491: Service Learning in Environmental Studies

Research Interests

Nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. environmental ethics and civil rights history in a global context

Competing scientific, medical and legal claims in environmental public health

Ethnographic and oral documentary studies of race, class, gender, and place in the U.S. South