
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is an American historian who is a professor at Oregon State University. He writes and speaks about international dimensions of science, technology, and the environment, especially related to nuclear issues, ecology, oceans, and climate. He has written five books, dozens of essays, and is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s Birdsall Prize (for best book in military or strategic history) and the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize (for best book for a general audience). His most recent book, The Wretched Atom, won the 2022 Frances Fuller Victor Prize in general nonfiction at the Literary Arts Oregon Book Awards.
Hamblin has chaired book and essay prize committees for the History of Science Society, American Society for Environmental History, and Society for History of Technology. He created H-Environment Roundtable Reviews and edited more than thirty of them from 2010 to 2015. He commissioned and edited essay reviews for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences from 2011 to 2015, and has served as advisory editor for that journal continuously since 2011. He was advisory editor of Isis (2009-2011), was on the advisory board of Environmental History (2013-2018), and was a founding editorial board member of Modern American History (2016-2019). He is the founding “Environment and the Life Sciences” subject editor for Journal of the History of Biology (2020-present), and serves on the editorial board of Oregon State University Press (2020-present).
Current Research Projects
Hamblin is the PI on the OSU Downwinders Project, working with colleague Linda Richards. We are developing archival collections, conducting oral histories, and doing research on the history of radiation and dose reconstruction related to cancer victims and nuclear sites. More on that here.