CHE Community Associates

CHE's Community Associates are folks in the campus and greater Madison community whose work and interests address questions relating to culture, history, and environment that define what CHE is all about. To learn more about how community members can get involved with CHE, click here.

I work in civil rights enforcement, doing education about residential segregation and investigations of illegal housing discrimination in Madison and Dane County. I also founded the ongoing Writers in Prisons Project and taught creative writing and humanities classes for four years in a men's correctional facility. I hold an MFA from UW-Madison and was a Halls fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. contact
Andrew Case

I completed my PhD in the UW-Madison Department of History in 2012 and now work as a visiting assistant professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. My research explores the history of natural food and health movements in the twentieth century United States and the intersection of print culture and environmentalism. My dissertation work was on J.I. Rodale and The Rodale Press who were pioneers in both the popular culture and commerce of organic food and natural health in the decades after 1945. I am currently turning this work into a manuscript, and researching the history of direct marketing of foods and other consumer products. website | contact
Mike Dockry

I was born and raised in Green Bay, WI and am a registered member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. I have a BS in Forestry with a Certificate in Environmental Studies from UW-Madison, an MS in Forest Resources from Penn State, and a PhD in Forestry from UW-Madison with a Minor in Geography and a Certificate in "Indigenous Landscapes" from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Center for Culture, History, and the Environment. I am a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and served from 1997-2000 in Bolivia where I worked in both the Andean mountains and the Amazonian tropics. After my Peace Corps service, I was selected as an Assistant Forest Planner for the US Forest Service on the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes National Forests. Currently I am the US Forest Service Liaison to College of Menominee Nation in Keshena, WI. My research interests focus on sustainable forestry and indigenous people in North and South America. My dissertation focused on environmental history and indigenous community forestry in Bolivia and Wisconsin. website | contact

Jim Feldman

Jim Feldman teaches Environmental Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His book, A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands, was published in 2011 by the University of Washington Press. His current research investigates the history and sustainability of radioactive waste disposal and storage. contact

Jeff Filipiak is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley in Menasha. He earned his BA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his PhD at the University of Michigan with a dissertation titled "Learning from the Land: Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson on Knowledge and Nature." He also studies organic growing and John Denver, and has taught courses on sustainability, "Food and Power," environmental ethics and the Great Lakes. Outside of school, he served on the board of Slow Food-WiSE, and acted as Milwaukee's Ambassador of Snow. contact
Sean Gillon

My research focuses on: environmental politics and governance, especially related to agriculture and energy; political ecological, political economic and institutional analyses of nature-society relations; and agrifood studies and agroecology. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher on UW Madison's interdisciplinary Water Sustainability and Climate Project. This work aims to identify effective institutions structures and interventions for improving linked social and ecological outcomes of regional resource governance. I earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where my dissertation research focused on agriculture, political economy and nature in US Midwestern biofuel production. contact
Toshihiro Higuchi

I am an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, 2012-2014 at the History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Japan, I am a recent graduate from Georgetown University. As a modern international environmental historian, I am currently writing a book on one of the first truly global pollution crises triggered by nuclear weapon explosions through 1963. I am interested in an elastic and dynamic sense of space which trans-border pollution such as climate change signifies. My next book project will trace the 200-year evolution of international fur seal conservation in the North Pacific. For more information, please visit my department website. contact
Carolyn McAndrews

Carolyn (Carey) McAndrews's research centers on the questions: What are the characteristics of social and institutional environments that support environmentally sustainable and socially just development, and how do we know what is sustainable and just? Her current research focuses on how health-related values and policies become part of land development decision making, and whether these ideas challenge communities' established economic, social, and physical relationships to the automobile, streets, and neighborhoods. Carey is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar in the Department of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison. She completed her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from UC Berkeley in 2010. She has a multi-disciplinary background in economics (BA Brown University, 2000), urban planning (MCP UC Berkeley, 2006), and transportation engineering (MS UC Berkeley, 2006). contact