Dr. Jason Colby
Position
Status
On leave
Contact
Credentials
BA (Whitman), MA, PhD (Cornell)
Area of expertise
Environmental History, Pacific Coast History, Humans and Climate Change, Modern American History, US International Relations
Bio
I was born in Victoria and grew up along the Pacific Coast, mostly in Puget Sound in Washington State. During my high school and undergraduate years, I worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and on fish farms in Puget Sound. I also studied abroad in Central America. Before entering graduate school, I taught history and English in Taiwan, worked at a land-use law firm in Seattle, and travelled throughout the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. I earned my PhD from Cornell University in 2005 and taught at the University of Texas at El Paso before coming to the University of Victoria in 2007. I teach and write on environmental history and US international history with a particular interest in the historical interactions of humans and whales in the North Pacific. My third book, Devilfish: The History and Future of Gray Whales and People is forthcoming with University of Washington Press in 2027. Currently, I am working on an environmental history of the world through the lens of sperm whales and elephants entitled Sperms and Pachyderms: A Terraqueous History.
Selected publications
Books
Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator (Oxford University Press, 2018)
The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2011)
- Honourable mention, Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
- Honourable mention, Ralph Gomory Prize, Business History Conference
Recent articles and chapters
“Tuffy’s Cold War: Science, Memory, and the US Navy’s Dolphin,” Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History (University of Calgary Press, 2022).
“Swimming with Gigi: Captivity, Gray Whales, and the Environmental Culture of the Pacific Coast,” Across Species and Cultures: Whales, Humans, and Pacific Worlds (University of Hawaii Press, (2022).
“Learning to Love the Sea Wolves,” Spirits of the Coast: Orcas in Science, Art, and History (Royal BC Museum, 2020).
“Conscripting Leviathan: Science, Cetaceans, and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History (June 2020).
Interviews and Public Events
“Whale Tale,” CBC Podcast Series with Grant Lawrence (2026)
“How Captivity Changed Everything,” Pod of Orcas, SeaDoc Society, April 2021
Seattle Aquarium, Sound Conversations, May 2019
KUOW, National Public Radio—Seattle, July 2018
Digital Articles
“Orcas and Ourselves,” Aeon (February 2026)
“The Real Whale Who Changed the World”
“How Live Capture Changed Scientific Views of Killer Whales”
Courses
| HSTR 100 | History, Power, and Justice |
| HSTR 101E | Environmental History of the World |
| HSTR 201 | Introduction to Historical Research |
| HSTR 210A | The United States to the Civil War |
| HSTR 210B | The United States since 1865 |
| HSTR 303B | United States since 1945 |
| HSTR 307A | The United States in the World, 1750 - 1914 |
| HSTR 307B | The United States in the World, 1914 - present |
| HSTR 410 | Seminar in American History |
| HSTR 471 | Seminar in Thematic and Comparative History |
Grad students
In progress
Timothy Cunningham, “‘Every Year is Therefore a Separate Problem’: Fisheries, Forestry, and the Future of Salish Sea Sockeye”
- Winner of SSHRC Doctoral Award
Completed
Ella Cathcart, "Race, Gender, and the Development of Alberta's Tar Sands” (MA, 2023)
Rachel Schneider, “‘Expansion is too Clean a Name for it’: Black Perspectives on American Imperial Expansion, 1898-1902” (MA, 2023)
Aimee Richard, “Whale Watching in the City” (MA, Public History, 2022)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Gordon Lyall, “Turning the Tide: Clams and Colonialism in the Salish Sea, 1925-1994” (PhD, 2022)
- Winner of SSHRC Doctoral Award
Timothy Cunningham, “Beasts in the Garden City: Animals, Humans, and Settlement on Canada’s West Coast” (MA, 2021)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Kelly J. Clark, Happy Endings (documentary film)(MA, Public History, 2018)
Adam Kostrich, “The Imperial Species: Masculinity and Necropolitics in Frank Buck’s Writings” (MA, 2018)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Isobel Griffin, “Managing the Entertainment: Marine Mammal Technologies at Marineland of the Pacific” (MA, 2018)
Jake Sherman, "'A Ship on the Waves of the Zeitgeist:' An Oral History of the Georgia Straight, 1967 – 1973” (MA, 2018)
Blake Butler, “Fishing on Porpoise: The Origins and Early Years of the Tuna-Dolphin Controversy” (MA, 2017)
- Winner of SSHRC Master’s Award
Sheila Hamilton, “Panamanian Politics and Panama’s Relations with the United States Leading Up to the Hull-Alfaro Treaty” (MA, 2014)
Matt Logan, “‘We Say All the Real Things. And We Believe Them’: The Establishment of the United States Information Agency 1953” (MA, 2012)
Carlee Johnson, “Remembering ‘the American Island of Oahu’: Hawai'i Under Military Rule 1941-1945” (MA, 2011)
Jackson Todd, “Politics, Ideals, and Religion: Abraham Lincoln and the Growth to Emancipation 1860-1863” (MA, 2009)
Rob Douglas, “‘Being Successfully Nasty’: The United States, Cuba and State-Sponsored Terrorism” (MA, 2008)