Andrew Gutkowski, Ph.D.

I am a Lecturer in the History Department at Baylor, where I teach courses on the history of environmental inequality in the United States. I regularly teach U.S. in Global Perspective: Race, Power, & the Environment and periodically upper-level sections such as U.S. Environmental History and The American Civil Rights Movement.  

My research explores the history of industrial pollution, hazardous waste disposal, and grassroots environmental activism in the post-war 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. Using GIS mapping, oral histories, and archival sources, I demonstrate that decisions by state and local officials—rather than isolated corporate malfeasance—helped entrench environmental racism in the region's urban geography. 

My latest project, forthcoming 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. I trace how local women, often working outside of mainstream environmental organizations, challenged their exclusion from environmental decision-making by founding neighborhood associations, conducting health surveys, and entering local politics. Their activism, rooted in everyday concerns about public health and family life, helped reshape environmental policy in Louisiana and sparked new forms of interracial organizing. Together, my work demonstrates how race, gender, and political economy have intersected to create the South's uneven geography of environmental hazards—and reveals how local communities have persistently fought back.