Jack Bouchard

Jack Bouchard is Assistant Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he has taught since 2020. A specialist in environmental and Atlantic history, he focuses on maritime food systems, early modern fisheries, and island geographies of the late-medieval and early-modern Atlantic world.

Education

• Ph.D. in History, University of Pittsburgh, 2018
• M.A. in History, McGill University
• B.A. in Classical Studies and History, Brandeis University

Research Interests

Bouchard’s scholarship explores the intersection of environmental change and human labour in the earliest phases of European expansion into the Atlantic basin. His work on sixteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries situates the northwest Atlantic within broader networks of trade, colonization, and ecological transformation stretching from Saharan Africa to the Caribbean. He is equally invested in the global history of foodways, examining how taste, provisioning, and maritime labour shaped pre-modern empires.

Current projects include an environmental history of the Río de Oro on the Saharan coast and a study of seabirds in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Atlantic, both extending his long-standing interest in the entangled histories of animals, environments, and human economies.

Recent Publications & Trends

Across fifteen major articles and two forthcoming books, Bouchard’s output reveals a consistent focus on the environmental and cultural dimensions of early Atlantic fisheries, commodity chains, and colonial expansion. His forthcoming monograph Terra Nova (Yale University Press, 2025) synthesizes these themes, while collaborative volumes and journal articles extend the analysis to culinary culture, cartographic imagination, and avian ecologies.

Professional Affiliations

• World History Association (WHA)
• American Society for Environmental History (ASEH)
• Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI)
• American Historical Association (AHA)

Teaching & Seminars

At Rutgers, Bouchard teaches undergraduate courses such as The Seas Around Us: Ocean History in Global Perspective and Food in the US and the World, as well as graduate colloquia in environmental and early-modern European history. In 2025-26 he will co-lead the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis seminar “Hunger” with Carla Cevasco.