Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award

Rochelle Johnson was selected by the IHC Board of Directors as the 2024 winner for her outstanding contributions to the humanities across her exemplary career. Dr. Johnson holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she has taught literature, writing, and environmental studies. A recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Idaho Professor of the Year award, she has earned several research fellowships from the Idaho Humanities Council, as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and—three times—from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Known for her deeply interdisciplinary approach to learning, Rochelle’s courses include “Knowing Birds,” “Visions of Environment,” “Science Writing,” and “Natural History & Ethics at the Museum.” Rochelle has authored or co-edited seven scholarly books, most recently Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Essays on an American Icon. She is a scholar of American landscape aesthetics, and her writings on environmental literary history and environmental pedagogy appear in various journals and anthologies. Rochelle is also a creative writer. Her “Phantom Pains” essay won the Georgia Review Prose Prize in 2025. Other creative nonfiction appears in Baltimore Review, The Revelator, and the Thoreau Society Bulletin, where she published quarterly columns during her four years as president of the Thoreau Society (2020-2024).Summertime often finds her teaching for the Bread Loaf School of English.

Rochelle places great value on providing service to her communities. At the College of Idaho, in addition to serving as chair of both English and Environmental Studies, she has organized the Henberg Environmental Lecture since its inception in 2014 and directed the honors program for 18 years. A lecturer for the IHC Summer Teacher Institute, she assisted IHC with an NEH review, participated in the Let’s Talk About it series, and served as State Scholar for the Smithsonian travelling exhibit, “Crossroads: Change in Rural America.” In Boise, she has taught for Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning, and in Caldwell she involved dozens of students in efforts to uncover Indian Creek and revitalize downtown, including orchestrating a collaboration of 36 students on a book-length natural history of Indian Creek. Regionally and nationally, Rochelle has served the boards of several organizations, including the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History in Caldwell. A past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), she currently chairs the award committee for the Thoreau Prize in Literary Nature Writing. Current projects involve a museum exhibit on Susan Fenimore Cooper and climate change, consulting with Ken Burns/Ewers Brothers Films on a documentary on Thoreau, and finalizing her next book, Amputated: Flourishing with a Forgotten Naturalist in a World of Wounds.