About

Robert Michael Morrissey is a professor in the American Indian Studies Program at the Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His research focuses on early American frontier history and environmental history, with a particular interest in the environment and indigenous power in early America. His recent book, People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America, is an environmental and cultural history of the tallgrass prairie region of North America in pre-modern times, which received the Hal K. Rothman Prize in Environmental History of the American West from the Western History Association. Morrissey has held the position of Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where he led interdisciplinary programming, research, and curriculum development. He is involved in collaborative projects such as Reclaiming Stories, aimed at revitalizing indigenous knowledge and practices related to hide painting and tattooing within Miami and Peoria communities. As an educator, he teaches courses on early America, environmental history, and the American West, and has integrated special projects into his courses, including exhibits and mini-documentaries. In 2024, he was named a University Scholar and currently serves as the Associate Dean for Technology and Online Learning in the College of LAS.

Research topics

• History
• Political Science
• Law
• Ancient history
• Economic history
• Geography

Selected publications

• The French Midwest

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract An important chapter of the Midwest’s past is the colonial period during which French colonists explored and settled in small outposts, fur trade centers, religious missions, and small agricultural villages throughout the region. This period of history has its echoes in Midwestern place names and on the built environment, as many of these early settlements and outposts became important parts of Midwestern geography down to the present. Yet while sometimes celebrated and commemorated, the French past has been simplified and romanticized in regional histories. This chapter explores the French past of the Midwest and argues that it comprises an important and usable part of the Midwest’s regional identity.

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• Native Americans

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-10-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainability

  Environmental History · 2025-06-19

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  For environmental historians, the analytic of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) may help frame, identify, and historicize ways in which Indigenous communities have interacted with and shaped their environments over centuries. A concept invented in anthropological scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, TEK has for two generations been adopted by scholars and many Indigenous people themselves to name both specific and general historical phenomena—a plethora of ideas, cosmologies, and spiritual and cultural concepts through which Indigenous people engage nonhuman nature. As such, TEK’s emphasis on reciprocity, resilience, and the interconnectedness of natural systems has informed environmental historians in both methodology and interpretation, helping them explore and analyze the cultural specificity of Indigenous peoples’ ideas of the natural world, especially in contrast to colonial or settler ideas. At the core of TEK is the idea that nature is not merely a resource but a network of fellow beings with whom humans interact in reciprocal relations. Environmental historians who incorporate TEK into their work often identity a long trajectory of sustainable relationships that Indigenous communities have cultivated with the land, embodied relationships that are not unintentional cultural practices but highly regulated systems of knowledge—Indigenous science. Such knowledge systems cover many domains: relationships to plants, land and water, animals, community, self, and cosmos. They regulate longstanding practices such as controlled burns, crop rotation, and wildlife management. Together, these ways of knowing and their related practices define a sensibility Anishinaabe people call bimaadizi, or “living in a good and respectful way.” By examining how these practices were disrupted but not destroyed by colonialism, environmental historians have expanded our understandings of Indigenous culture, sovereignty, and the ecological consequences of settler expansion. Challenges exist with the concept of TEK in historical scholarship. Most importantly, academic researchers have a long history of essentializing and romanticizing Indigenous peoples and their cultures, not to mention extracting and appropriating their knowledge. In one sense, TEK confronts these legacies, and scholars generally deploy the concept to challenge conventional hierarchies of knowledge production in research, as well as to assert values of autonomy, validity, and sovereignty for communities. More problematic for the use of TEK in historical discussions, however, is the difficulty of the ahistorical concept of “traditional,” especially when applied by non-Indigenous researchers. Given history’s foundational mission to examine change and contingency, TEK’s general emphasis on deep continuity, or abstract “tradition,” may explain why there is relatively little literature in environmental history that adopts the concept wholeheartedly. Relatedly, scholars of Indigenous history are often motivated to confront deeply rooted stereotypes and mythology about Indigenous peoples’ environmental relations in the Western imagination, motives that may make them more inclined to historicize and complicate rather than risk embracing tropes of unchanging and timeless Indigenous culture and practices. In short, TEK raises methodological and ethical issues around academic research and communities, but it is a useful concept for exploring Indigenous environmental relations, past and present. TEK is an analytic discussed and developed by researchers across the world and its literature is vast, especially in works of current “applied” policy and development studies. This article considers the context of the United States primarily (with some literature on Canada and Mexico), and it limits its focus to works and themes of interest to practitioners in the field of environmental history. It focuses on English-language works, and it deliberately excludes the voluminous literature written from a policy perspective on integrating TEK principles into specific present-day management, intellectual property, or economic development programs.

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• The Cambridge History of the American Revolution

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-10-30

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  The first volume delves into how the context of the American Revolution was set, taking readers across North America and the world to reveal the far-flung people, events, institutions, cultures, and ideas that led to its inception. Through a global lens, the volume shows how empires struggled with political and economic reforms, as well as popular protest, while competing and warring with each other. On a continental scale, long-term environmental and economic structures, native peoples, colonial settlers, and their interactions set the parameters for revolutionary conflict. Focusing on the thirteen colonies, -particularly groups who are traditionally overlooked- the essays shed light on the specific milieus in which the Revolution took place, examining and reinterpreting the iconic events leading up to independence and war. A mixture of broad topical essays and short innovative “viewpoints”, together the essays question notions of American exceptionalism while emphasizing both change and continuity.

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• People of the Ecotone

  University of Washington Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Winner of the 2023 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize for best book in western environmental history from the Western History Association Indigenous power in a significant cultural and ecological borderland In People of the Ecotone , Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most transformative and misunderstood events of early American history. To do this, he also offers the first comprehensive environmental history of some of North America’s most radically transformed landscapes—the former tallgrass prairies—in the period before they became the monocultural “corn belt” we know today. Morrissey situates the complex rise and fall of the Illinois, Meskwaki, and Myaamia peoples from roughly the collapse of Cahokia (thirteenth to fourteenth century CE) to the mid-eighteenth century in the context of millennia-long environmental shifts, as changes to the climate shifted bison geographies and tribes adapted their cultures to become pedestrian bison hunters. Tracing dynamic chains of causation from microscopic viruses to massive forces of climate, from the deep time of evolution to the specific events of human lifetimes, from local Illinois village economies to market forces an ocean away, People of the Ecotone offers new insight on Indigenous power and Indigenous logics.

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• French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy

  2021 · 2 citations

  • Geography
  • History

  "French St. Louis places St. Louis, Missouri, in a broad colonial context, shedding light on its francophone history"--

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• Empire by Collaboration: St. Louis, the Illinois Country, and the French Colonial Empire

  2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Ancient history
  Publisher

• INTRODUCTION:

  2021-08-01

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• Introduction: A French City in North America

  2021

  • History
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• Ohio History 2010

  2020-04-02

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Frequent coauthors

• Jay Gitlin

  Yale University

  2 shared

• Peter J. Kastor

  2 shared

• John B. Weaver

  1 shared

• Barbara Terzian

  1 shared

• Martha I. Pallante

  1 shared

• Jarret Ruminski

  1 shared

• Brian Schoen

  1 shared

• Nancy E. Tatarek

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Conrad Humanities Scholar, 2016-2021
• Helen Corley Petit Scholar, 2016-17
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2015-16
• Illinois Center for Advanced Study Fellowship, 2015
• George and Gladys Queen Excellence in Teaching Award, Depart…