Chiarappa Accepts CES Post

Michael Chiarappa

Michael Chiarappa, former associate professor of history and environmental studies at Western Michigan University, is the new director of the Center for Environment and Society.

Chiarappa succeeds Wayne H. Bell, who stepped down from his administrative and teaching posts last spring. Bell will continue his association with the Center as a Senior Associate.

With a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania specializing in American environmental history, Chiarappa has focused his academic career on the teaching and research of American regional cultures and environments. His interdisciplinary use of American cultural history, ethnography, and material culture studies, he says, examines the interplay of geographic and environmental consciousness ("sense of place"), landscape transformation, and natural resource legacies.

As a specialist in maritime environmental studies, Chiarappa helped establish the Great Lakes Center for Maritime Studies, where his courses focus on environmental values, history, policy and fieldwork methods. He has been involved with a number of vessel-based classroom settings, including the Delaware Bay-based Bayshore Discovery Project and the Great Lakes-based Inland Seas Education Association.

One of his signature programs was "Fish for All: Perspectives on the History of Lake Michigan Fisheries Management and Policy." His students conducted their investigations aboard fisheries research vessels and commercial fishing boats.

Chiarappa is highly recognized on national and international levels for research that combines environmental history, landscape studies, cultural resource management and environmental policy and planning.

"Although my teaching, outreach and research have taken me to many locations in the U.S. and abroad," he says, "my interest in the environment was shaped at an early age by the Chesapeake and Delaware estuaries. Anyone who is familiar with the Chesapeake Bay can attest to its sublime beauty and its historic standing as a water system containing some of the world's most compelling issues. Washington College's location and mission provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to channel that appeal into wide-ranging and purposeful inquiry."