Neil M. Maher is a Professor of History and Master Teacher in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark.  He is an award-winning author, instructor, and public speaker interested in the environmental and political history of the United States.

Maher’s scholarship and teaching explore how the natural environment has mediated power relationships between people over time.  His most recent books include Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008).  He has also written more popular essays and Op-Eds for The New York Times and The Washington Post.  Maher’s research has been supported by fellowships from Harvard and Princeton universities, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and NASA, among others.

Maher is currently working on his third book, which is tentatively titled Wasted: An Environmental Justice History of Newark, New Jersey.  The monograph, which emerged from his teaching and community engagement work over the past several years, analyzes the connections between racial and environmental discrimination in Newark during the post-World War II period.  During the 2022-2023 academic year, Maher began researching and writing this book as a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in Manhattan.  He continued working on this research project during the fall semester, 2023-2024, as a Shelby Cullom Davis Center Fellow at Princeton University.

Maher’s community engagement work also focuses on the city of Newark.  Most recently he received a three-year $650,000 grant from NJIT to collaborate with the Newark Water Coalition (NWC) in establishing the Community Data Equity AI Lab (Community-DEAL).  This partnership, which involves historians, data scientists, biologists, and engineers from the university working alongside staff, activists, citizen scientists, and volunteers from the NWC, will collect, analyze, and archive water data from all five wards in Newark and make it publicly accessible and comprehensible to local residents in the city through an easy-to-use interactive AI platform.

Much like his research and community work, Maher’s teaching also focuses on the intersection of environmental and political history.  His offerings include courses in U.S. environmental history, urban history, and political history seminars on the Great Depression, the immediate post-World War II period, and the 1960s-1980s era.  More recently, Maher has developed an environmental justice website for research seminars that he teaches on the undergraduate and graduate levels.  For such efforts he has received the two most prestigious teaching awards at his university.

Federated History Department at NJIT Rutgers, Newark

Rutgers New Brunswick History Department

NJIT Science, Technology and Society Program 

Rutgers, Newark American Studies Program

NJIT-Rutgers, Newark Urban Systems Program