CHE Faculty Members
If you are interested in becoming a CHE faculty associate, you may find out more on our How faculty can get involved page.
Samer Alatout is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Environmental 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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Anna Vemer Andrzejewski is Associate Professor in the Art History Department, where she teaches courses on the history of North American vernacular architecture and landscapes, and also has an affiliation with Urban and Regional Planning. Her first book, Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2008. Currently she is working on two projects: a book on Madison builder/developer Marshall Erdman and an extensive study of southwestern Wisconsin’s lead mining region (with Arnold Alanen). She also co-directs the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures program, a joint Ph.D. program in architectural history with UW-Milwaukee.
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Ian Baird is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography. He is also affiliated with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Human Rights Initiative. He is primarily interested in political ecology, and is engaged with issues associated with hydropower dam development in the Mekong Region, economic land concessions in Laos and Cambodia, and nature-society-politics in upland parts of mainland Southeast Asia, especially amongst the Brao and the Hmong. He also has a wide range of other interests, including the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) framework and its implications for resource tenure in Southeast Asia.
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 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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Joe Dennis – I am an historian of early modern China. My research focuses on Chinese social,
legal, and book history, but I teach more broadly. I am currently completing a book manuscript
on the writing, publishing, and reading of local gazetteers, a key source for historians of China.
In the fall of 2011, I will teach a Freshman Interest Group seminar, "China and the
Environment," which is linked to Chinese 101 and Environmental Studies 113. I am also
working with historian Sarah Thal to develop a new course, "East Asian Environmental History,"
tentatively scheduled to be taught in spring semester, 2013
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Samuel Dennis Jr, PhD, ASLA, is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and has affiliate appointments in Environmental Studies, Geography, Family Medicine and Urban and Regional Planning. As a geographer and landscape architect, his research practice focuses on understanding and creating environments that support human health and well-being, especially for young people. He is particularly interested in the role urban open space plays in preventing chronic disease. Although he continues to pursue his early interest in the social construction of landscape meaning, his current research engages communities in environmental assessment using a tool called participatory photo mapping.
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Eve Emshwiller is an Assistant Professor in the Botany Department. Her research interests center on the ethnobotany, systematics, evolution, and conservation of crop plants and their wild relatives. She studies agrobiodiversity, especially the domestication of crops, their evolution under human influence, and their conservation biology. Current projects include research on the phylogenetics and morphological evolution of the genus Oxalis, the origins of polyploidy and domestication of the Andean tuber crop "oca," Oxalis tuberosa, and the distribution of clones of oca in traditional Andean agriculture. Her lab also studies organic acids in oca, biochemistry of traditional Chinese medicinal plants, and the origins of domestication in Chenopodium. She teaches UW-Madison’s first ethnobotany course.
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Anna M. Gade is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia and the Religious Studies Program at UW-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1999. She is a scholar of global Islam who specializes in trends in religious and social change Muslim Southeast Asia. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Cambodia. Her book, The Qur’an: An Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2010), includes perspectives on Islam and ecology. Her research and teaching address topics in comparative Muslim religious responses to environmental change.
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Jess Gilbert is Professor in the Department of Community and Environmental 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.
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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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Lynn Keller is Martha Meier Renk Bascom Professor of Poetry in the English Department. Author of Re-Making it New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition, Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women, and Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics, she specializes in contemporary U.S. poetry. She is in the early stages of a book project that brings ecocritical perspectives to bear on the experimental poetries that interest her, thereby bringing her scholarship more in line with the land stewardship and prairie restoration she is engaged in outside the academy
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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's research explores the interconnected histories of ecosystem health and human health. My recently-published book, Toxic Bodies (Yale, 2010) asks how and why endocrine disrupting chemicals have saturated our bodies and our environments. My first book, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (University of Washington Press, 1995) examined the cause of the forest health crisis in the Inland West. My second book, Where Land and Water Meet, (University of Washington Press, 2003) explored watershed change in the arid west. And my current book project, Sustaining Lake Superior [http://www.sustaininglakesuperior.com] focuses on the interconnected histories of watershed health, human health, and forest health--all in the context of climate change. I am a new member of the Binational Forum, the citizen's group dedicated to protecting and restoring Lake Superior. I have recently served as President of the American Society for Environmental History, and I am the incoming editor of Environmental History. Four months of the year I spend in a tiny cabin on Lake Superior, outside of Cornucopia WI. When the university is in session, I live with my husband Frank Goodman, our two pit bulls Tiva and Vanya, 18 hens, and 100,000 honey bees on a small farm south of Madison. I am an avid sea kayaker, cyclist, nordic skier, snowshoer, backpacker, and pretty much anything else I can do outside.
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Maria Lepowsky
specializes in 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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Erika Marín-Spiotta studies how human activities affect the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems. Most of her work focuses on linking above and belowground processes across different spatial scales, from the landscape to molecular interactions. She is particularly interested in the legacies of land-use history on biodiversity and carbon cycling and in feedbacks between land-use/land-cover change and climate change.
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Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women's Studies. Her research interests include imperialism and the environment; the invention of nature, nationalism and gender; photography and the environment; the animal question. Her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest explores in
part how the Enlightenment invention of 'nature' became an indispensible aspect of the British imperial project. Her current teaching includes a course on imperialism, photography and the animal question. She is researching a new book called Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question, Imperialism and Carceral Modernity. She has recently published a series of essays and photographs on the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf. website | contact
Cathy Middlecamp is an associate professor in the Nelson Institute, Howe Bascom professor in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program, and an affiliate of the Chemistry Department. Her interests lie at the intersection of science, people, and culture. She designs, teaches, and assesses courses that connect chemistry to real-world issues such as air quality, climate change, nuclear weapons/energy, and stratospheric ozone depletion. Middlecamp currently serves as the editorin-chief of Chemistry in Context, a project of the American Chemical Society. contact
Gregg Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. 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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John Nelson is a consultant to the design and construction industry, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research interests and consultancy center on sustainability and lean design. During his tenure in industry, he served in a variety of roles, including Chief Executive Officer, at Affiliated Engineers. John holds an MS in mechanical engineering from the UW-Madison and is a Registered Professional Engineer. John also serves as a Trustee on the UW Foundation Board, and as Treasurer of the Green Lake Association. In addition, he serves as a Construction Peer in GSA's design excellence program. website | contact
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). His book Slow Violence and Environmental Time is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Professor Nixon teaches creative nonfiction, postcolonial studies, environmental literature, and twentieth century British literature in the UW English Department. Professor Nixon has been the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, a MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellowship, and an NEH.
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Ken Raffa is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Beers-Bascom Professor in
Conservation, with an affiliate appointment in the Dept. of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. He
conducts research, teaches, and provides policy advice on forest insects. He is interested in
how ecological systems function, developing methods for sustainable management of
natural resources, and pest responses to anthropogenic changes. website | contact
Adena Rissman
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, and an affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Agroecology Program, and the Land Tenure Center. My research investigates the relationships between society and environment, focusing on conservation, ecosystem management, and resource use. I examine forests, wildlife, rangelands, agriculture, and water resources both locally and nationally, through participatory research approaches. My research centers around three themes: 1) natural resource policy design, implementation, and evaluation; 2) ecological outcomes of resource policy and conservation strategies; and 3) social and legal adaptation to environmental change. website | contact
Sissel Schroeder is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the American Indian Studies Program, and the Material Culture Studies Program. She is also the director of the L&S Honors Program. Her current research is focused on the role of ethnic diversity (as identified from distinctive archaeological materials, particularly architecture and ceramics) in the formation and dissolution of communities and polities in the ancient Mississippian (c. A.D. 1000-1500) societies of the southeastern United States. Her multi-scalar approach to these issues draws on aspects of agency theory and environmentalism and highlights how the places where ancient people chose to settle reflect the changing constraints and opportunities presented by the spatial distribution of resources, potential for establishing gardens and agricultural fields, availability of habitable land, the peaceful or bellicose nature of relationships with other peoples living nearby, and perceptions and traditions about the landscape that may include the construction of earthen mounds.
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Laura Senier holds a joint appointment in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Department of Family Medicine. She teaches classes on environmental justice and public health in rural and urban communities. Her research interests include the sociology of public health and medicine, community environmental health, and environmental justice. Her current research examines how scientists are incorporating both genetic and environmental predictors in the study of causes of common diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. She is launching a new project that identifies barriers in the translation of genetic findings into public health policies and interventions.
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Sarah Thal
is an associate professor in the Department of History. Her first book,
Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan,
1573-1912 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), examined the transformation of a sacred
site amidst political, economic, and religious upheaval. She continues to research Shinto
and other topics in the political, intellectual, and economic history of Japan. She is
affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies and the Religious Studies Program, and
is working to expand the UW's offerings in the environmental history of East Asia.
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Matt Turner is member of the faculty of Geography, African Studies, Development Studies, the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. His research interests concern the historic and contemporary relationships between changing social relations, rural livelihoods, social justice, and ecology. More specifically, his work in rural West Africa has addressed the following themes: labor scarcity, capital accumulation and overgrazing; drought, food insecurity, and gender relations; the politics of the environmental scientific knowledge; nonequilibrium ecology and common property theory; and social identities and natural resource conflict.
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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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CHE Emeriti
Arnold R. Alanen is an emeritus professor of landscape architecture whose primary interests are in landscape history and historic preservation. During his academic career he was heavily involved in documenting cultural landscapes for the National Park Service in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Alaska. He is co-editor of Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (2000); and author of Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town (2007). Another volume, Main Street Ready-Made: The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin (1987), was republished by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2012 to mark the 75th anniversary of the settlement.
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