Prof. Harriet Ritvo
Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and teaches courses in British history, environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall (Cambridge University, UK) and Balliol College (Oxford University, UK). She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received her A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard; she also studied at Girton College (Cambridge University).
Ritvo is the author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (2010).
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.