Arnold R. Alanen is a professor of landscape architecture whose primary interests are in landscape history and historic preservaiton. He has been associated with the National Park Service in documenting cultural landscapes at NPS sites ranging from Wisconsin and Michigan to Alaska. His co-edited book, Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, is used in numerous historic preservation courses throughout the United States. A forthcoming book, Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in late 2007.
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Samer Alatout is an assistant professor in the Department of Rural Sociology, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Graduate Program of Sociology, and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. His research interests are in the sociology of science and technology; environmental sociology; and social theories of power. In the past, Alatout focused his research on water politics in Palestine and Israel since the mid-1930s. More recently, he has been involved in two research projects. The first is an ongoing, theoretical engagement with social theories of power and governmentality. The second is a multi-sited comparative project examining the mutual construction of political and ecological orders in border zones—the Mexico/US border; the Palestine/Israel border; and the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin.
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Mike Bell is principally an environmental sociologist and a social theorist, but he also conducts research on culture, agricultural sustainability, economic sociology, community, place, rural society, inequality, gender, the body, democracy, and whatever else catches his fancy. Three central foci can be found in all of his work: dialogics, the sociology of nature, and social inequality. Currently, Mike is writing a social theory book on dialogue and dialogics and conducting a range of research projects on participation, sustainability, and agroecology. He is also co-chair of the Agroecology Graduate Program, co-director of the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, and a member of the Agroecology Cluster at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a member of the faculty of the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies.
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William Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies. An environmental historian, he is currently completing a book entitled "Saving Nature in Time: Toward the Rebirth of Environmentalism," and is also writing a history of Portage, Wisconsin from the late Pleistocene to the present.
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Jess Gilbert is Professor in the Department of Rural Sociology and is
part of the Land Tenure Center. He studies the history and sociology of
agriculture in the modern United States. Current research projects
include work with African-American farmers and landowners, and a study
of policy intellectuals and "grass-roots" land-use planning during the New
Deal. website | contact
Leila Harris is a geographer working at the intersection of nature-society theory, political ecology, critical development studies, and gender/feminist theory. Her research includes attention to water politics and governance (especially in Turkey and the Middle East), social inequality and environment (particularly gender), and recent shifts with respect to devolution, democratization and privatization of water resources. Professor Harris’s courses at UW Madison also include focus on environmental justice, neoliberalized natures, and North American political ecology.
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Sara Hotchkiss studies ecology on time scales that range from decades to tens of thousands of years, comparing observations of modern ecosystems with paleoecological data. Her projects include studies of ecosystem disturbance, climate change, and human-landscape interactions in the Great Lakes region and the Hawaiian Islands.
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Richard Keller Richard Keller’s research lies at the intersection of the history and ethnography of European and global health. His first book, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007), is a study of cross-cultural psychiatry in the twentieth century. He is now at work on a new project, a study of the intersections of human and environmental vulnerability in the deadly European heat wave of 2003. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the project explores the coupling of human, natural, and technological systems in a period of disaster. Keller teaches courses on the historical and contemporary dimensions of European and international health.
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Nancy Langston is a forest and environmental historian, with appointments in the Department of Forest Ecology and Management,the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Department of History (affiliate). Her research examines the shared history of people and their forests, asking how and why forests have changed over time, how people have used and altered the forests, how our perceptions of forests have evolved, and how societies have struggled to establish policies governing forests. She is completing a book on the relationships between ecosystem health and human health.
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Maria Lepowsky
Cultural anthropology, anthropology of gender, historical anthropology, history of anthropology, environmental anthropology, exchange and ritual, medical/nutritional anthropology, psychological anthropology, Pacific Islands, California and the American West.
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Arthur F. McEvoy is J. Willard Hurst Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At Madison he is also Professor of History and Chair of the Land Resources Program in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He is the author of The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980. He teaches courses in History of American Law, Environmental Law, Water Rights, Environmental Justice, and Torts. He is currently at work on a history of industrial safety law in the United States.
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Gregg Mitman is Director of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment. He is also the William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in twentieth-century America across scientific and popular culture. His most recent book is Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, published by Yale University Press.
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Paul Nadasdy is Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies and an affiliate of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. His research focuses on the political dimensions of environmental knowledge production and use in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where he has conducted extensive ethnographic research on processes of wildlife management and the negotiation and implementation of First Nation land claim and self-government agreements. In 2004, his book, Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon (University of British Columbia Press), won the Julian Steward Book Award for Ecological Anthropology.
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Eric Olmanson In his position as a researcher for the University History Project, Eric Olmanson has studied the University of Wisconsin from many different angles. As a geographer/environmental historian, his research interests include environmental perception, landscape change, boosterism and urban/rural development, migration and settlement patterns, ethnic enclaves, agriculture, popular culture, World War I-era propaganda, and vigilantism. His book The Future City on the Inland Sea: A History of Imaginative Geographies of Lake Superior (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007) recently won the Great Lakes American Studies/Ohio University Press book award. He is currently completing a history of the College of Letters & Science.
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Sissel Schroeder is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliate of the American Indian Studies Program. Her current archaeological research addresses the evolutionary significance of emerging sociopolitical complexity among ancient tribal and chiefdom societies in the eastern United States, and the spatial distribution of people in relation to inconstant and heterogeneous social, natural, and anthropogenic landscapes.
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Jason Yaeger My research examines how past social and political institutions were constituted, with special focus on everyday practices. I have pursued this problem in different research contexts. Since 1991, I have studied Classic Maya farming communities in the Belize River. An emerging component of this research entails contextualizing these communities within the region’s dynamic natural and cultural landscapes. I have also studied Belize's colonial period, examining the development of Maya identity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, I have examined how the Inka modified preexisting sacred spaces at the ancient city of Tiwanaku, Bolivia, to evoke a creation narrative that legitimized Inka imperialism.
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Zhou Yongming obtained his Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and his M.A. and B.A. in Chinese from Nanjing University. His research interests are globalization, political ecology, ethnicity, nationalism, and online politics. He is the author of Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History and State Building (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet and Political Participation in China (Stanford University Press, 2006). He was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC during 2001-02. He is working on a book project tentatively titled “Frontiers Incorporated: History of Road Construction in China East Himalayas”.
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