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.
website | contact

Anna Vemer AndrzejewskiA is Associate Professor in the Art History Department, where she teaches courses on the history of North American vernacular architecture and landscapes. 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.
website | contact

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.

website | contact

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.
website | contact

 

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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.
website

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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

 

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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

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.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

Adrian Treves is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies affiliated to Agroecology and working closely with colleagues in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. His research focuses on agroecosystems where crop and livestock production overlap carnivore habitat. He and his students work to understand and manage the balance between human needs and carnivore conservation. They study lions and hyenas in Kenya and Uganda, bears and pumas in the Andes, and wolves and black bears here in Wisconsin. In parallel, his lab strives to understand the perceptions and behaviors of the people who live alongside wildlife.
website | contact

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.
website | contact

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”.
website | contact

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.
website | contact