Dr. Strachan Donnelley, NHC emeritus trustee, was a philosopher who made a lifelong study of the intricate relationships between humans and nature in pursuit of a conservation-centered concept he called “democratic ecological citizenship.” Dr. Donnelley was director of education and president at the Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., a bioethics think tank. In 2003, he founded the Center for Humans and Nature to bring together thinkers from many fields to look at the long-term implications of how humans live on this planet. Dr. Donnelley passed away in July 2008.
Dr. Donnelley’s wife, Vivian, served on the Center for Humans and Nature’s board of directors from 2008 until her death in 2019. Vivian was also a board member and Senior Admissions Associate at the Dalton School, an independent, co-educational day school (K–12), in New York City.
The couple endowed the Donnelley Family fellowship in 2006. It is awarded annually to humanities scholars whose work focuses on humans’ relationship to the environment.
| 2006–2007 | David G. Christian | San Diego State University | Inner Eurasian History |
| 2007–2008 | Stephen Salkever | Bryn Mawr College | The Ethics and Politics of Natural Questions |
| 2008–2009 | Richard W. Unger | University of British Columbia | Energy, Economy, Environment in Early Modern Europe |
| 2009–2010 | Jared Farmer | State University of New York, Stony Brook | Trees in Paradise: A California History |
| 2010–2011 | Cynthia Radding | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Bountiful Deserts and Imperial Shadows: Corridors of Knowledge and Migration in Northern New Spain (1680–1820) |
| 2011–2012 | David Neale Bunn | University of Johannesburg | An Unnatural State: Boundary Identities in South Africa’s Kruger National Park |
| 2012–2013 | Emese Mogyoródi | University of Szeged, Hungary | Revelation and Reason: Mysticism and Metaphysics in Parmenides |
| 2013–2014 | Marixo Lasso | Case Western Reserve University | Building La Zona: Landscaping Urban Development at the Panama Canal, 1904–1914 |
| 2014–2015 | Christopher Witmore | Texas Tech University | Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Morea, Greece |
| 2015–2016 | Judith Walkowitz | Johns Hopkins University | Feminism and Urban Space in London in the 1970s and 1980s |
| 2016–2017 | Matthew Booker | North Carolina State University | The Oyster and the City: The Rise and Fall of the Edible City, 1870–1930 |
| 2017–2018 | Stephanie Foote | West Virginia University | The Art of Waste: Narrative, Trash, and Contemporary Culture |
| 2018–2019 | Claudia Leal | Universidad de los Andes, Colombia | National Parks in Colombia: A History of Territorial State Building, 1940–2010 |
| 2019–2020 | John Levi Barnard | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | The Edible and the Endangered: Food, Empire, and the Biopolitics of Extinction |
| 2020–2021 | Ryan E. Emanuel | North Carolina State University | Water in the Lumbee World: Environmental Justice, Indigenous Rights, and the Transformation of Home |
| 2021–2022 | Victoria McAlister | Southeast Missouri State University | The Insular Globe: Environmental Change and Landscapes of Colonization‚ Ireland, 1000–1700 |
| 2022–2023 | Thomas M. Lekan | University of South Carolina | “Conservation by Slaughter”: Wildlife Utilization and the African Origins of Sustainable Development, 1959–1980 |
| 2023–2024 | Marguerite Nguyen | Wesleyan University | Refugee Ecologies: Forced Displacement and American Literature |
| 2024–2025 | Ashley Carse | Vanderbilt University | The Age of Mitigation: Global Shipping and a River on Life Support |