Erin Stewart Mauldin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History on the St. Petersburg campus. An environmental historian who studies the intersection of race, environment, and economic inequality in the nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. South, she completed her doctorate at Georgetown University in 2014. Her work draws on the insights of the natural sciences in order to reframe the "big questions" of southern history: slavery as capitalism, the impact of emancipation on southern agriculture, race relations, and economic stagnation in the shadow of "King Cotton". Her book, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, published by Oxford University Press in 2018, demonstrates how the Civil War accelerated ongoing ecological change in ways that hastened the postbellum collapse of the region's subsistence economy and encouraged the expansion of cotton production, ultimately trapping cotton farmers in a cycle of debt and tenancy. The dissertation on which it was based won the 2016 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award. Her next project, The First White Flight, investigates the role of industrial pollution in racially segregating southern cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has been supported by generous grants from the American Philosophical Society, USF, and the American Society for Environmental History. She is the co-editor of The Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley, 2012), and her work has appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Reviews in American History, the Alabama Review, and several edited collections including The Oxford Handbook to Reconstruction and Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. She is the co-editor of Environmental History and the American South book series at the University of Georgia Press, and serves as the book review editor for the journal, Agricultural History.