Dr John Wills

Lecturer in American History
Web Editor
Dr John Wills riding along in his automobile

Biography

John Wills is a scholar in American Studies. He studied at Warwick University (BA History and Politics) and Bristol University (MA Contemporary History and PhD in American Environmental History), before teaching in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. In September 2005, he took up a post at the University of Kent, teaching in the School of History and the Centre for American Studies.

His research and teaching interests bridge several disciplines, most notably history, sociology, and cultural studies. He works on US environmental, cultural and visual topics, in particular 1950s American society, popular tourism and nuclear landscapes, Disney and theming, California, environmental protest, cyber-culture and videogames, and Hollywood Westerns. In 2003, John won the C.L. Sonnichsen Award for best article in the Journal of Arizona History for his study of donkey management in the Grand Canyon. In 2005, he co-authored a book on global park culture (Invention of the Park: Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom), while in 2006 the University of Nevada Press published Conservation Fallout, a look at nuclear protest in California. He recently finished The American West: Competing Visions (with Dr Karen Jones, also at Kent), to be published with Edinburgh University Press in March 2009. Future projects include a textbook on US environmental issues and doomsday scenarios, and further work (including an online database) on the Arcade Western. Along with Maeve Pearson (Exeter), he edits the European Journal of American Culture.

John's taught modules are currently EN303 Introduction to American Studies (the first-year core course for all American Studies students), HI795/HI796 Inviting Doomsday: US Environmental Problems in the Twentieth Century (a second/third year option), HI5049/HI5050 California: The Golden State (a final year special subject) and HI857 Geiger Counter at Ground Zero: Explorations of Nuclear America (a Masters option). He is keen to supervise postgraduates with research interests in American popular culture, US environmental and social issues, and digital culture.

Alongside work, John is a Buddhist, a tai-chi enthusiast and a yoga practitioner. Having played computer and videogames for over twenty years, he now visits arcades 'strictly for research'.

Selected Publications

Books
  • (with Karen Jones), The American West: Competing Visions, Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

    synopsis

    amwest

    The American West used to be a story of gunfights, glory, wagon trails, and linear progress. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Hollywood movies such as Stagecoach (1939) and Shane (1953) cast the trans-Mississippi region as a frontier of epic proportions where 'savagery' met 'civilization' and boys became men. During the late 1980s, this old way of seeing the West came under heavy fire. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White forged a fresh story of the region, a new vision of the West, based around the conquest of peoples and landscapes.
    The American West: Competing Visions explores the bipolar world of Turner's Old West and Limerick's New West and reveals the values and ambiguities associated with both historical traditions. Sections on Lewis and Clark, the frontier and the cowboy sit alongside work on Indian genocide and women's trail diaries. Images of the region as seen through the arcade Western, Hollywood film and Disney theme parks confirm the West as a symbolic and contested landscape.
    Tapping into popular fascination with the Cowboy, Hollywood movies, the Indian Wars, and Custer's Last Stand, the authors show the reader how to deconstruct the imagery and reality surrounding Western history.

  • Conservation Fallout: Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon, University of Nevada Press, 2006.

    synopsis

    Dr John Wills - Conservation Fallout: Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon

    Published in September 2006, Conservation Fallout represented the first work to fully document the history of Diablo Canyon, California, a ground zero of American nuclear protest in the post-1945 period.  The pioneering study raised a number of significant arguments: the competing visions of ecological doomsday and abundant energy production in the period; the social construction of nature at Diablo; California as an escalating energy landscape (with linkages to the California energy crisis); and shifts in protest ideas and strategy (‘conservation fallout’).  On Monday July 31, 2006, the book provided the headline feature for ‘Insight,’ an interview and current affairs public radio programme on KXJZ, broadcast in California and Nevada, and licensed by California State University. For the hour-long programme, titled ‘Diablo Canyon / One of the Big Boys’ (the other half looked at the Sacramento entertainment industry), host Jeffrey Callison discussed with the author issues relating to Diablo, nuclear energy and the new book. Diablo Canyon meanwhile provided the headline story for the San Luis Obispo New Times, dated December 4, 2006 (Vol. 21, Issue 21), which drew on an interview with author Wills as well as research based on Conservation Fallout.  In the article, entitled “The Devil and the Details,” journalist Patrick M. Klemz discussed changing public attitudes towards the nuclear plant.  Robert W. Righter reviewed 'Conservation Fallout' for The Journal of American History (94:1 June 2007). Righter was won over by the book's "compelling narrative," "admirable prose" and "fine sense of timing." "As we move toward new energy horizons this look at the turbulent past will help chart the nation's future course," Righter enthused.

  • (with Karen Jones), The Invention of the Park: Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom, Polity Press, 2005.

    synopsis

    Dr John Wills & Dr karen Jones - The Invention of the Park: From the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom

    Published simultaneously in hardback and paperback in 2005, Invention of the Park explored the evolution of the park idea across both time and space in a series of seven chapters based on distinct park types.  The work proved exceptional for its comparison of landscapes rarely connected in scholarly discourse (for example, Versailles and Disneyland), its global coverage, and its measured exploration of the function of the park in modern society. John Prest, from Balliol College, Oxford, reviewed Invention of the Park for The English Historical Review (Vol. CXXI, No.491, April 2006).  Prest was particularly impressed by the “three informative chapters [that] deal with City Parks, National Parks and Amusement Parks and Theme Parks,” feeling that “Here North American sources come into their own.” Prest appreciated the theoretical linkages made between staging at older parks and the post-1945 Disney engineering impulse, noting that, “They [Jones & Wills] argue persuasively that the rituals performed at the French court, the celebration of Whig politics and English liberty by Lord Cobham’s guests, and the tour round Henry Hoare’s lake, following in the wake of Aeneas, were not really very different from what goes on in Disneyland.” In another favourable review, published in the American Historical Review (Vol. 111, Issue 5, December 2006), Invention of the Park was recognised for its scope and innovation, “nice turn of phrase” and “fascinating details”.  Its contribution to the field of environmental history was duly surmised: “This is indeed the first comprehensive study of the park idea and the perfect book, therefore, for next Sunday’s afternoon’s sojourn on a park bench.”

Book Chapters
  • 'America and the Environment' in Martin Halliwell & Catherine Morley, eds., American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, University of Edinburgh Press, 2008

    synopsis

    america
    Will the 21st century be the next American Century? Will American ideas and power dominate the globe in the coming years? Or is the prestige of the United States likely to crumble beneath the pressure of new international challenges?
    This ground-breaking book explores the changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, when the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or more controversial. It brings together some of the most eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues facing the United States during the early years of our new century.
    From the hidden political shifts beneath the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this book explores the political, social and cultural contours of contemporary American life - but it also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, ideological conflict and international diplomacy.
    These eighteen new essays address such pressing issues as leadership, foreign policy, propaganda, religion, health, technology, digital media and 9/11 culture. The authors look back to the Clinton years and earlier periods of 20th-century American life, but they also look forward to the new horizons of the century to come - to the unknown challenges of a global future and to the soaring possibilities of American enterprise and imagination.

Journal Articles
  • "Pixel Cowboys and Silicon Goldmines: Videogames of the American West," Pacific Historical Review 77/2 (May 2008)

  • "Donkey Politics in the Grand Canyon,” Endeavour 30/3 (September 2006)

  • "Celluloid Chain Reactions: The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island," European Journal of American Culture 25/2 (August 2006)

  • "'On Burro'd Time': Burros of the Grand Canyon and the Pursuit of Undying Wilderness" Journal of Arizona History 44/1 (Spring 2003). ‘On Burro’d Time’ was the winner of the annual C.L. Sonnichsen Award for best article in the Journal of Arizona History 2003

  • "Abalone, Rattlesnakes and Kilowatt Monsters: Nature and the Atom at Diablo Canyon, California," Cultural Geographies 10/2 (April 2003)

  • "Digital Dinosaurs and Artificial Life: Exploring the Culture of Nature in Computer and Videogames," Cultural Values 6/4 (October 2002)

  • "'Welcome to the Atomic Park': American Nuclear Landscapes and the 'Unnaturally Natural'," Environment and History 7/4 (November 2001)

  • "Talking Atoms: Anti-Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon, California," Oral History 28/2 (Autumn 2000)
Encyclopaedia Entries
  • “Nuclear weapons and testing,” Encyclopaedia of World Environmental History, Routledge, 2004.

  • “International Cyber-crime: Is the Internet Outside the Law?,” History Behind the Headlines Volume 6, Thomson Gale, 2003.

  • “Alcatraz” and “Nuclear Protest,” The Encyclopaedia of Marches and Demonstrations, ABC-Clio, 2003.

  • Contributing Editor (post-1865 sidebars and essays) The American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002.

  • “San Francisco Earthquakes” and “Three Mile Island,” Dictionary of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002.

  • “The Oregon Trail” and “Fur Trapping,” J. Rodriguez, ed., The Louisiana Purchase: An Encyclopaedia (2002).

  • “Geography and Ecology,” Encyclopaedia of the United States In the Nineteenth Century, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000.
Book Reviews
  • William H. Katerberg, Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction, Pacific Historical Review (forthcoming)

  • Karen Halttunen, ed., A Companion to American Cultural History, Reviews in History (forthcoming).

  • J.P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology, Technology and Culture (forthcoming).

  • Max Power, America's Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup, Organization and Environment (forthcoming).

  • Daniel Pope, Nuclear Implosions: The Rise and Fall of the Washington Public Power Supply System, Journal of American History (forthcoming).

  • Horace Herring, From Energy Dreams to Nuclear Nightmares: Lessons from the Anti-Nuclear Power Movement in the 1970s, Environment and History 12/4 (November 2006).

  • Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement, Journal of Arizona History 46/1 (Spring 2005)

  • John Burns & Richard Orsi, eds., Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California 5/1 American Nineteenth Century History (Spring 2004).

  • Mary Lawlor, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West, History 86/284 (October 2001).

  • Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, Environment and History 7/3 (August 2001).

  • Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, American Nineteenth Century History 2/2 (Summer 2001).

  • Ann Meyers & Margaret Pritchard, eds., Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, Journal of American Studies 34/3 (December 2000).

  • James Rawls & Richard Orsi, eds., A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, Environment and History 6/4 (November 2000).

  • Timothy Mahoney, Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West, The Economic History Review LIII/3 (August 2000).

  • Brian McGinty, Strong Wine: The Life and Legend of Agoston Haraszthy, The Economic History Review LII/3 (August 1999).

  • Bruce Hevly & John Findlay, eds., The Atomic West, Environmental History 4/2 (April 1999).
Media Work, Awards and Invitations
  • British Academy Research Grant for the project 'American Environmental Doomsdays: A Study of Catastrophe Culture and Ecological Fear', August 2009-May 2011.

  • “Thinking Allowed” BBC Radio 4 feature/interview on The American West, 11 March 2009.

  • "American Nuclear Landscapes: Doom Town and Diablo Canyon," The Nuclear Forum: An Exploration of the Nuclear in Culture, The Arts Catalyst, the Royal Society of Arts and SCAN, RSA London, 28 Nov 2008.

  • Newspaper interview, '110 B-61 warheads reported moved from RAF Lakenheath,' Stars and Stripes, 2 July 2008.

  • "The Arcade Western: The Digital West Explored," University of East Anglia, 19 Feb 2008.

  • “Utopia or Doomsday: Atomic Power at Diablo Canyon,” Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, 31 Oct 2006.

  • Radio interview, Insight Programme, Capital Public Radio (California/Nevada) over Diablo Canyon and new book, 31 July 2006.

  • HERO (Higher Education & Research Opportunities) news feature on Diablo book, Nov 2006.

  • Newspaper interview, ‘The Devil and the Details’ San Luis Obispo New Times, 30 Nov 2006.

  • C.L. Sonnichsen Award for best article in the Journal of Arizona History 2003.

  • Historical Society of Southern California / Haynes Research Stipend 2001.


Teaching

Undergraduate
Module Code Title
EN303 Introduction to American Studies
HI795/HI796 Inviting Doomsday: US Environmental Problems in the Twentieth Century
HI5049/5050 California: The Golden State
Postgraduate
Module Code Title
HI857 Geiger Counter at Ground Zero: Explorations of Nuclear America

He is keen to supervise postgraduates with research interests in American popular culture, US environmental and social issues, and digital culture.

Contact

E: J.Wills@kent.ac.uk
T: 01227 823243
Room: Rutherford N2.W2