David
W. Orr Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus and
senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College. He is a
founding editor of the journal Solutions, and
founder of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city
of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners
to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of
Oberlin.
Orr
is the author of eight books,
including Dangerous
Years:
Climate
Change,
the
Long
Emergency,
and
the
Way
Forward
(Yale,
2016)
and
Down
to the
Wire:
Confronting
Climate
Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has
authored over 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and
professional publications.
In
the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to
eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations,
including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold
Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Alliance for
Sustainable Colorado and the Children and Nature
Network.
He
has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards
including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the
National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from
Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and
universities throughout the United States, Europe, and
Asia.
While
at Oberlin, he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build
the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in
2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years,”
and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by
the U.S. Department of Energy and was instrumental in funding the
Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center.
Prior
to this position, I was a Lecturer in Political Science at Tufts
University, where I taught courses on American politics,
public policy, and public law. In the 2016-17 academic year, I
was a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, where I
taught courses on American politics and quantitative
methodology. In the 2015-2016 academic year, I was a
Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political
Science at Washington University in St. Louis. I completed my PhD
in Political Science at Columbia University in 2015, with emphases
in American Politics (major subfield) and Methodology (minor
subfield). My dissertation, "When Do Agencies Have Agency?
Bureaucratic Noncompliance and Dynamic Lawmaking in the United
States, 1973-2010," examines the conditions under which
administrative agencies implement in ways that provoke constraints
from Congress and the courts, often for behavior that I refer to as
noncompliance.