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Dr. Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, and the 2024/25 Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Library of Congress. 

Degroot’s work bridges the humanities and sciences to explore how communities have responded to abrupt changes in environments on Earth and across the Solar System. He aims to better understand how environmental forces have shaped human history – partly to offer fresh perspectives on the gravest threats and greatest opportunities of the twenty-first century.

Much of his scholarship identifies past changes in climate and considers how they influenced human history. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores how the Dutch Republic – the precursor of today’s Netherlands – endured the Little Ice Age, a period of natural climatic cooling. The book reveals that while climatic cooling worsened disasters that the Dutch struggled to overcome, it also offered opportunities that the Dutch aggressively exploited. The Frigid Golden Age was named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of 2018. Currently, Degroot is co-editing a series of volumes that consider different dimensions of past climate change in order to inform present-day policy, including The Oxford University Press Handbook of Resilience in Climate History. 

Degroot publishes widely in historical and scientific journals, including Nature and The American Historical Review. In many of these publications, he uncovers how populations found ways to cope with climate change. Such examples of “resilience” and “adaptation” have been systematically understudied in climate scholarship. Degroot also works to develop new methods for connecting human and climatic histories; to uncover new relationships between climate change and conflict; and to incorporate the histories of animals within the human history of climate change. ​

A second area of focus for Degroot is the environmental history of outer space. For example, his second book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: A History of People and Environments in the Changing Solar System (Harvard University Press/Viking, 2025), argues that dynamic environments across the Solar System have profoundly influenced the human history of the past five centuries. He is co-authoring another book, tentatively entitled Breach, that reframes the early history of the Space Age as a close encounter with the existential risk of microbial contamination. The book will offer a roadmap for how to mitigate some of the potentially catastrophic risks humanity faces today.
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While working on these and other projects, Degroot teaches courses at Georgetown on topics that include the Little Ice Age, the impacts of global warming, the environmental history of outer space, existential risk, and the Anthropocene. He regularly plans major events at Georgetown that explore different dimensions of today’s environmental crises, as well as outer space exploration, exploitation, and settlement. He also aims to bring the lessons of the past to activists, policymakers, and the general public – most recently through The Climate Chronicles.

Degroot regularly gives lectures to audiences around the world, and his writing has appeared in Aeon, The Conversation, and the Washington Post, among other outlets. He has been interviewed for articles that appeared in, for example, Axios, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Popular Science, Space.com, USA Today, and the Washington Post.

To keep up with Degroot’s latest publications, visit DagomarDegroot.com.