Susan Scott Parrish is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan, where she is also Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. She researches the history of how races and environments have been mutually constituted in North America since the colonial period, with a special emphasis on the plantation zone understood in an Atlantic context. She has written two prize-winning books: The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (2017) and American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006).