McBride Endowment Advances Environmental History Research, Scholarship at UMaine
Contact: Richard Judd, 581-1910; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — The University of Maine History Department’s program quality and graduate-level research will be enhanced significantly as a result of a new endowment designed to expand scholarship in the field of environmental history.
The Col. James C. McBride endowment, administered by the University of Maine Foundation, also is intended to coalesce programs and disciplines at UMaine to raise the university’s visibility as an international center for environmental history. It will allow the establishment of new graduate research opportunities, courses, lectures, conferences, and a joint research seminar with the University of New Brunswick.
History Professor Richard Judd, a member of the UMaine faculty since 1984 and an authority on Maine and New England environmental history, has been named the inaugural Col. James C. McBride Professor for the initial five-year cycle. The designation carries a financial stipend and funds for new environmental education and research initiatives, which include a graduate research assistantship, a national conference on New England environmental history, semi-annual environmental history lectures, a series of monthly noontime speakers and a UMaine-based network of New England and Eastern Canadian scholars in the field.
“What we hope to do is highlight the importance of natural sciences in history,” says Judd, who has published five books in the field and developed particular expertise on the Maine forest industry and the roots of conservation in New England, Oregon and the nation. “For the department, we hope to create an environment that makes it really interesting to study environmental history here.”
UMaine already is considered among the top 10 institutions for environmental history studies at the graduate level, he says. “We’re trying to make the University of Maine one of the top two or three. That’s what excites me the most about this.”
Judd says resulting collaboration among faculty, researchers and graduate students from academic areas including forestry, sustainable agriculture, marine sciences, wildlife, tourism, parks and recreation, Native American studies, and the UMaine Folklife Center, will strengthen interdisciplinary communication and create exciting new opportunities for research in history.
Judd was chosen as the McBride Professor to lead the effort by a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences selection committee chaired last year by former dean Ann Leffler.
Department Chair Scott See says that Judd, “one of North America’s foremost environmental historians,” was an appropriate choice as the first McBride Professor and as the catalyst to elevate the university’s presence as one of the country’s top research institutions.
“Professor Judd was selected because of the quality and quantity of his scholarship, his established presence as one of the History Department’s most active mentors of graduate students, and his contributions to projects that link the university to the state of Maine, including the Maine Woods Forever Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Project and the Maine Historical Society’s Web-based Maine Memory Project, which is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities,” See says.
Col. James McBride was a UMaine alum who graduated with a degree in economics in 1954. The son of an U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, McBride was born in North Dakota, raised in Portland, Maine and lived in New York state and Gloucester, Mass. A former UMaine ROTC member, McBride was a decorated military career officer who served in Korea, France, Vietnam and Taiwan before retiring as a full colonel in Fort Gordon, Ga. A history enthusiast, McBride died in 2003 in Spokane, Wash.
McBride’s generous endowment to the Department of History was arranged through the University of Maine Foundation.