Gerard J. Fitzgerald

Gerard J. Fitzgerald serves as Lecturer in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. He concurrently holds a Visiting Scholar position at The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, University of Stavanger (Norway), and co-leads the War and Environment Special Interest Group of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH).

His educational credentials include a Post-doctoral fellowship at MIT's Dibner Center for the History of Science and Technology, Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.A. from the University of Georgia.

Dr. Fitzgerald employs a rigorous interdisciplinary methodology spanning environmental history, sensory history, public health history, and history of science to examine warfare's environmental consequences across major conflicts from the Civil War to the Cold War. His research critically analyzes industrialization and militarization impacts, particularly biological/chemical weapons development and anthropogenic climate change during the Anthropocene, framing these as existential threats to humanity and planetary systems. This work bridges historical analysis with urgent contemporary security challenges.

His 2018-2020 publications reveal consistent focus on environmental-military intersections, with recent works connecting historical pandemics to Covid-19 responses and examining wartime environmental degradation. These studies demonstrate evolving methodological sophistication in linking historical events to current climate security threats through detailed archival analysis of industrial-military complexes.

Through his leadership in ASEH's War and Environment SIG, Dr. Fitzgerald actively cultivates international scholarly collaboration on military-environmental dynamics. His academic engagement extends to teaching STS 4600: The Engineer, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility, where he integrates historical perspectives into engineering ethics education.