Dr. Christine Rosen is an Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of CA Berkeley, where she teaches courses in American business history, sustainable business, political, economic, business, and societal strategies for fighting climate change while continuing to provide the benefits of modern energy systems in the developed world while extending those benefits to the people of the developing world. She is an Associate Director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, and on the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.
Professor Rosen received her PhD in American History at Harvard University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the rebuilding of American cities after great fires. A faculty affiliate (and former Faculty Director) of UC Berkeley’s American Studies Interdisciplinary Major Program, Chris is a disciplinary boundary spanner who is dedicated to team teaching and bringing multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the study of the history and the current challenges of recognizing what modern society’s environmental problems are, developing technical solutions for them, and then mobilizing the public and governmental support and economic resources needed to implement the solutions.
Chris’s doctoral work focused on the important role local businessmen took as leaders of movements to rebuild burned out American cities better than before by taking advantage of the devastation wreaked by great fires. She is now working on a book about struggles against industrial air and water pollution in the United States between 1840 and 1920. Here again, progressive, reform minded business leaders assumed important leadership roles. She is analyzing how they organized to achieve their reform goals, including how they worked productively with other local businessmen, as well as women reformers and sanitary reformers, in these efforts. She is also studying the limits of their political and economic power – relating what they achieved and failed to accomplish to today’s struggles over how to protect society from toxic industrial chemicals and climate change.