Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: natural disasters, urban environmental history, San Francisco, earthquakes, beaches

About Me: Joanna L. Dyl received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in History. Her research focuses on the environmental history of the modern United States. Her topical interests include natural disasters, urban environmental history, California and the American West, and environmental justice.

Dyl is the author of Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake, published by the University of Washington Press in 2017 as part of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series.

She has taught history and environmental studies at the University of South Florida, Franklin & Marshall College, the University of Redlands, and Pomona College. She also spent a year at Amherst College as a fellow with the Copeland Colloquium. She currently lives in Southern California only a few miles from the San Andreas Fault.

Recent Publications: • Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017).

• “Transience, Labor, and Nature: Itinerant Workers in the American West,” International Labor and Working-Class History, special issue Environment and Labor, 85 (Spring 2014): 97-117.

• “Lessons from History: Coastal Cities and Natural Disaster,” Management of Environmental Quality 20, no. 4 (2009): 460-473.

• “The War on Rats versus the Right to Keep Chickens: Plague and the Paving of San Francisco, 1907-1908,” in Andrew C. Isenberg, Ed., The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape and Urban Space (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006): 38-61.