Name Mott Greene Role Historian of Science | Awards MacArthur Fellowship | |
Education Columbia College of Columbia University in the City of New York Books Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift | ||
Mott T. Greene (born 1945) is an American historian of science, and is John B. Magee Professor of Science and Values Emeritus, at the University of Puget Sound, from which he retired in 2012. He is currently Affiliate Professor of Earth & Space Sciences at the University of Washington.
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Life
After attending the Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y. Greene attended Columbia College where he majored in Sociology and Asian Studies, and graduated in 1967. He then went on to graduate study in Japanese language and literature in the Department of East Asian Languages at Columbia. In August 1968 he married Abby Terris; they separated amicably in 1976 and divorced in 1977. While on a National Defense Education Act fellowship in 1968 to study Japanese at Columbia, Greene, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, was drafted out of graduate school in November 1968. He refused induction into the US Army, and after registering and being certified as a conscientious objector served two years of alternative service at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center between 1969 and 1971. On release from alternative service he enrolled in the University of Washington graduate program in History, completing a PhD in 1978 in History of Science, with minor fields in European Intellectual History, History of Ancient Greece, and History of Japan. Later that year he married Josephine Leffingwell, a Seattle actress and mountaineering instructor. They have one daughter, Annie, born in 1983. Greene lectured at Oregon State University. He is a member of the History of Science Society.