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Joseph Schiller

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Joseph Schiller

Joseph Schiller

Joe Schiller is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oklahoma. He earned bachelor’s degrees in History and English-Creative Writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a master’s degree in History at TCU. His dissertation examines race and environmental history in the rural United States across the twentieth century. Centered on the Tri-State Mining District at the junction of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, the project takes a wide view, in both space and time, of the American Rust Belt, capturing a deep history of the forgotten white working man whose past and future have again moved to the center of American politics. The wider Rust Belt was a process happening in diverse places, sending heavy and extractive industries offshore while at the same time industrializing agriculture in the rural United States. In settler towns the process was both environmental and racial: rust was a reaction among nature, industry, its built environment, and the political economy, while labor on and under the land performed important ideological work linking whiteness, progress, and manly breadwinning. Joe’s research links the farm crisis, rural deindustrialization, and the global Cold War extension of American power in illustrating how settler whiteness proved a weak laboring and political bulwark against environmental and economic collapse in what has become the Tar Creek Superfund Site, where the settler towns of Picher and Cardin, Oklahoma have vanished, and the Quapaw Tribe contracts with the Environmental Protection Agency in remediating the mining past.

Joseph.Schiller-1@ou.edu