Caroline Grego, Ph.D.

Biography

Caroline Grego is a historian of and from South Carolina whose work lies at the nexus of the histories of labor, race and racism, and the environment. She graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in geography in 2011 and earned her MA in geography from the University of British Columbia in 2013. She completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2019, which she finished with support from a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She was a visiting assistant professor in the History Department at Queens University of Charlotte from August 2019 to May 2022 and has been an assistant professor since the 2022 – 2023 academic year. At Queens, she teaches classes on the American South, U.S. history, the climate crisis, and Atlantic World history; she contributes frequently to the General Education program; and she mentors history majors’ senior thesis projects. In the classroom, Dr. Grego encourages students to view history as something usable, that can shape their worldview.

Her award-winning book, Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022. The book explores the consequences of the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history and how it contributed to the rise of Jim Crow. Beyond the book, Dr. Grego has a robust record of scholarship on southern history: she has published articles and essays in The Journal of Southern History, The American Historical Review, and the edited collection Reimagining American Disasters: New Essays in Cultural, Political, and Environmental History (Louisiana State University, 2023). She also speaks frequently at conferences in her field, such as the Southern Historical Association and the American Society for Environmental History, and on podcasts, where she engages in more open-ended conversations about her scholarship.

Education

Ph.D., History, University of Colorado Boulder
M.A., Geography, University of British Columbia
B.A., Geography, Middlebury College