Geoff Bil is a historian of science and European empires, with specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century botany, anthropology, empire, Indigenous and environmental history. Prior to joining the University of Delaware, he was a 2018–2019 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden, and held predoctoral fellowships at the Newberry Library, University of Sussex, and Victoria University of Wellington. He received his PhD in History from the University of British Columbia (2018).
His first book manuscript, “Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples and Empire” (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press) examines the history of British imperial engagements with Indigenous and vernacular knowledges in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere. Dr. Bil’s second book-length project, “Fields of Empire: Science, Ethnoscience and the Making of the American Century,” tracks American imperial engagements with Indigenous and vernacular knowledges in Sumatra and the Philippines under the emerging rubrics of ethnobotany and ethnoecology.
His work has appeared in History of Science, British Journal for the History of Science, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, History of Anthropology Review, Senses of Cinema and elsewhere. Additionally, Dr. Bil serves on the editorial board for the International Review of Environmental History and co-directs the Department of History’s Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture.