LeCAIN

Timothy James LeCain is a Professor of History whose work focuses on the ways in which the New Material Humanism can help us to better understand the past and future of humans and the planet. His latest book, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017), develops a bold theoretical and methodological approach that emphasizes the many ways in which a dynamic material environment creates humans, both as biological and cultural creatures. Squarely challenging the conventional lines drawn between human culture and nature, he argues we are best understood as inescapably material creatures whose intelligence and creativity arise from our engagement with the dynamic things around us, not in distinction to them.

LeCain's first book, Mass Destruction--an environmental and technological history of the giant open-pit copper mines developed in the American West--won the 2010 best book of the year award from the American Society for Environmental History and was chosen as an Outstanding Book of the Year by Choice, the review publication of the American Library Association. 

He has published numerous articles, op-eds, reviews, and given many invited lectures around the world, including in recent years, China, South Africa, Chile, England, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Norway, and the Czech Republic. In 2017, he was a senior visiting fellow at the Oslo Center for Advanced Study, the preeminent Norwegian institution for interdisciplinary academic research, where he collaborated with the Norwegian archaeologist and theorist Björnar Olsen on the project "After Discourse," investigating ways of moving beyond the post-modern cultural turn. From 2011 to 2012, LeCain was a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Münich, Germany, a global center for the study of the environmental humanities. He returned to the RCC in the fall of 2018 as a Visiting Scholar working with Christof Mauch on a grant to support collaborative research into the post-WWII physiological and cognitive changes in global human populations.

LeCain is currently a Professor of History at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, where he lives with his wife and two children, as well as a constantly growing menagerie of companion animals.

You can follow his work at Academia.edu.