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 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, was converted to the tenure track in fall 2022, and became an associate professor in 2026. At Queens, she teaches classes on the American South, U.S. history, global environmental history, and the city of Charlotte; 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 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. Hurricane Jim Crow won the Deep South Book Prize and the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World’s first book manuscript award. The book explores the consequences of the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history and how it contributed to the rise of Jim Crow. She is currently conducting research for her second book project, The Plantation and the Factory, which is an environmental and labor history of the Great Depression in South Carolina. In the book, she will explore how the uses and abuses of southern landscapes and laborers intertwined under cotton monoculture. The Great Depression is a key moment to understand those processes because it pushed southerners to take stock of their social and environmental conditions and to reassess their visions for how southern society could operate. Her research for this book has been supported by the Forest History Society, the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library, and the Agricultural History Society. Beyond the books, Dr. Grego has a robust record of scholarship on southern history. She has published numerous articles and essays, including in The Journal of Southern History, The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 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