Professor Elizabeth Hennessy has received the 2021 Leopold-Hidy Best Article Award for her 2020 publication in the journal Environmental History. The Leopold-Hidy Award is given by the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History in recognition of superior scholarship. Selected by the Environmental History editorial board, the award is based on elegance of the writing, thoughtfulness of the argument, novelty of the premise, and rigorousness of the scholarship.
Elizabeth Hennessy has received the 2021 award for her article “Saving Species: The Co-evolution of Tortoise Taxonomy and Conservation in the Galápagos Islands” (April 2020). Using a case study of the Galápagos tortoises, Hennessy makes a convincing case for critically engaging with species as a historical concept rather than operating as if it were a fixed scientific category. The editorial board was impressed with the degree to which the author “takes what could have been a mundane history of a change in taxonomic designation and crafts it into a lively essay on the histories of science and conservation and of the very concept of species itself.” In the board’s opinion, the article is “not only captivating in the way it is written, but also encourages environmental historians to push the bounds of the discipline.”
Elizabeth Hennessey is an Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies. She is a geographer who works at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology, science and technology studies, and multispecies studies with a regional focus on Latin America.
To read “Saving Species: The Co-evolution of Tortoise Taxonomy and Conservation in the Galápagos Islands” see Oxford Academic.