Andrew D. Gutkowski

Areas of Specialization

U.S. Environmental History, African American History, American South, Environmental Justice, Women’s & Gender History, Oral History

Education

Ph.D., University of South Carolina
M.A., Georgia College & State University
B.A., Macon State College

Academic Interests & Research Narrative

My research explores the history of industrial pollution, hazardous waste disposal, and grassroots environmental activism in the postwar U.S. South. I focus on how environmental inequality has been shaped by the region's distinctive histories of racial segregation, deindustrialization, and environmental policy. My article in The Journal of American History examines how the collapse of textile manufacturing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, left behind a toxic industrial landscape that disproportionately harmed Black neighborhoods — demonstrating through GIS mapping, oral histories, and archival sources that decisions by state and local officials, rather than isolated corporate malfeasance, helped entrench environmental racism in the region's urban geography. My most recent project, published in The Journal of Southern History, investigates how women in Louisiana organized against the rise of the hazardous waste disposal industry in the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how local women working outside mainstream environmental organizations challenged their exclusion from environmental decision-making by founding neighborhood associations, conducting health surveys, and entering local politics. Together, these projects demonstrate how race, gender, and political economy have intersected to produce the South's uneven geography of environmental hazards — and how local communities have persistently fought back.

My teaching grows out of the same questions that drive my research. In survey courses and upper-division seminars alike, I ask students to read U.S. history through the lens of race, power, and the environment — to examine how access to clean land, water, and air has been distributed unequally across American history, and how communities excluded from that access have organized to challenge it. At the introductory level, I emphasize primary source analysis and the recovery of perspectives that standard historical narratives have overlooked, from Indigenous land stewardship and enslaved people's environmental knowledge to grassroots environmental justice organizing in the late twentieth century. In upper-division courses, I push students toward original research and historiographical engagement, asking them to grapple with how environmental history and civil rights history illuminate each other in ways neither field fully captures alone.

Why I chose Baylor

I chose Baylor because of its deep commitment to social justice, undergraduate teaching, and interdisciplinary research. As a historian who researches environmental inequality, I am drawn to Baylor’s growing focus on environmental health and its support for interdisciplinary programs like the Environmental Humanities that bring together ethical inquiry, historical perspective, and public engagement. These commitments resonate strongly with both my scholarship and my teaching.

Selected Publications

Articles

• “The Willow Springs Controversy: Hazardous Wastes, Gender, and the Rise of Grassroots Environmentalism in Southwest Louisiana, 1974 – 1986.” The Journal of Southern History (Expected May 2026). Accepted for Publication.
• “The Evolution of Environmental (In)-Justice in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1900 – 2000,” The Journal of American History 106, no. 4 (March 2020): 923 – 948.

Reviews

• Review of Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement by Derek Handley in The Indiana Magazine of History (Forthcoming).
• Review of Wading In: Desegregation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Amy Lemco in The Journal of African American History 110, no. 1 (Winter 2025): 118 – 119. https://doi.org/10.1086/733981
• Review of Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental   Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis by Christopher Sellers in The Journal of Southern History 90, no. 3 (August 2024): 650 – 651. 

Selected Activities

Fellowships

• Common Home Fellows Program, Baylor University (2026) 
• Bridge Humanities Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship, University of South Carolina (2020)
• Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship, The Bilinski Educational Foundation (2019)

Course Offerings

• Undergrad: HIS 1300 | U.S. in Global Perspective – Race, Power, & the Environment 
• HIS 1366 | United States History since 1877 
• HIS 4375 | The American Civil Rights Movement

Work with Students

• Willing to advise undergraduate theses.