Community Associates

Andy Adams

Andy is a digital producer with a passion for visual media and creative culture. Since 2004, he has consulted arts organizations and cultural institutions that use the internet to engage, inspire, and educate the public. In 2006, he founded FlakPhoto Projects, a web-based digital/arts lab focused on promoting photography in all of its forms. He is the digital director at Outrider Foundation, an educational nonprofit committed to making the world safer and more secure.

In his spare time, he hosts the FlakPhoto Network, a 16,000-member online community focused on conversations about visual/media culture. He holds a BA in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Steve Brick

Steve Brick has spent 40 years working at the intersection of human energy use and the environment. As an undergraduate he was hired as a biology field assistant in a study of the environmental impacts of the Columbia Power Plant, near Portage. Much of his subsequent work focused on fossil fuel emissions and the atmosphere. He worked on the 1986 acid rain law in Wisconsin, the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, ozone attainment plans throughout the country, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, and, since the late ’90s, climate change.

He is a senior fellow in climate and energy at the Chicago Council for Global Affairs and a senior advisor to the Clean Air Task Force.

Andy Bruno

Andy Bruno is an associate professor in the Department of History and a faculty associate in environmental studies at Northern Illinois University. His research explores varied aspects of the environmental history of the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press published his first book, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History, in 2016. He is currently working on a history of the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia.

Richard Cleary

Richard Cleary is an architectural historian. He returned to Wisconsin after retiring from the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin as professor emeritus. He is an honorary fellow in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison.

His publications include studies on 18th-century French architecture and urban design, Roman Catholic church building in antebellum Texas, bridge design in the U.S., the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and spatial practices in the landscapes of sports. His current research interests include vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes in the Upper Midwest.

Lori DiPrete Brown

Lori DiPrete Brown has spearheaded a range of innovative programs of teaching and community engagement to advance quality of life and equity during her tenure at UW-Madison. Her teaching in the School of Human Ecology and the School of Medicine and Public Health is informed by 15 years of global health practice in 21 countries, and has spanned public health, human rights, civil society, community studies, quality improvement and innovation. Her scholarship includes over 40 articles and reports, and a textbook entitled Foundations in Global health Practice (Wiley, 2018). Her humanities and arts interests include fiction (Caminata, 2014), creative non-fiction and translation of Spanish poetry and literature into English.

Mike Dockry

Mike Dockry is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. He is a research forester and social scientist with the USDA Forest Service’s Northern Research and also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Forest Resources and the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota.

He is an associate editor for the Journal of Forestry and was the chair of the American Society for Environmental History’s diversity committee (2011-2017). From 2005 until 2013, Mike was the USDA Forest Service’s liaison to the College of Menominee. Mike earned his PhD in the forest and wildlife ecology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jim Feldman

Jim Feldman serves as the director of the Environmental Studies Program and teaches and history at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He is the author of A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands, and the editor of Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy. His current research investigates the history and sustainability of radioactive waste disposal and storage.

Jeff Filipiak

Jeff Filipiak is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley in Menasha, and a lecturer in environmental studies at UW-Oshkosh. 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, John Denver, and environmental themes in popular culture; and has taught courses on sustainability, environmental ethics, food studies, and the Great Lakes. Outside of school, he served on the board of Slow Food-Wisconsin Southeast, and acted as Milwaukee’s Ambassador of Snow.

Greta Gaard

Greta Gaard is a professor of English and coordinator of the Sustainable Justice Minor and the Sustainability Faculty Fellows at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Her scholarship emerges from the intersections of feminism, environmental justice, queer studies and critical animal studies.

Gaard’s anthology, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993), positioned interspecies justice as foundational to ecofeminist theory, and was followed by Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (1998), and Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (1998).

A founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), Gaard is co-editor of International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (2013), and her eco-memoir, The Nature of Home (2007), has been translated into Chinese and Portuguese. Her most recent book, Critical Ecofeminism (2017) advances Val Plumwood’s foundational ecofeminist philosophy in terms of climate change, species justice, and sustainability.

Jacob Grace

Jacob Grace currently works as a grazing and perennial agriculture outreach specialist for the UW-Madison Center of Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS), and as outreach coordinator for the the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit promoting agroforestry in the Midwest.

Jacob received master’s degrees in agroecology and life sciences communication from UW-Madison in 2018, and before graduate school he spent three seasons as a field instructor and guide with the Teton Science Schools in Jackson, Wyoming.

Jacob grew up on a family farm in northwest Missouri, where he helped his parents raise grass-fed beef cattle and native prairie plants.

Maxwell Gray

Maxwell Gray studied literature and information at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Now he’s a digital scholarship librarian in Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University, where he’s part of the Digital Scholarship Lab. His ongoing creative research project is a digital documentary poetry project called MOUNDS. The project also includes public digital scholarship at The Sundial and Edge Effects. It’s about medieval studies and white settler colonialism in the Four Lakes region of southern Wisconsin.

Monique Hassman

Monique Hassman (she/her/hers) is an applied anthropologist working as a watershed planner for Vernon County’s Land and Water Conservation and the nonprofit organization Valley Stewardships Network. This “boots on the ground” position includes fostering watershed councils, flood mitigation/recovery efforts, and GIS modeling to support regenerative agriculture and locally led conservation. She earned her PhD and GIS certificate from UW-Milwaukee and has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in food and agricultural systems, placemaking, disaster preparedness and response, and geographic information systems (GIS).

In her spare time, she can be found meddling with homesteading as a shepardess and practitioner of biodynamic
horticulture.

Douglas Haynes

Douglas Haynes is a nonfiction writer and poet whose work focuses on marginalized people and places. His book, Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters (University of Texas Press), tells the true stories of two Nicaraguan migrant families’ quests to escape poverty in Managua, one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities. His chapbook of poems, Last Word, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He also teaches writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he is an associate professor of English.

Gregory Hitch

Gregory Hitch is an environmental historian and PhD candidate in American studies at Brown University, working at the intersection of Indigenous studies, critical environmental justice, and science and technology studies. His dissertation, tentatively titled, “The Forest Keepers: An Environmental History of the Menominee Nation from Colonization to Climate Change,” investigates how European and American settler colonialism and capitalism disrupted Menominee relationships with the land, waterways, and ecosystems of the western Great Lakes region.

Using archival and ethnographic methods, Gregory tells a story of Menominee survival, adaptation, and resurgence through their historical and contemporary struggles for environmental and climate justice.

Nathan Jandl

Nathan Jandl is the associate director for the UW-Madison Office of Sustainability. Nathan earned his PhD in English from UW-Madison in 2016; while a graduate student, he completed a PhD minor through CHE and helped to found, edit, and eventually manage Edge Effects.

His scholarly work addresses the challenge of coping with multiple major environmental crises while not losing sight of certain psychological needs: durable social relationships, feelings of fulfillment and security, and a sense of agency in place-making. Nathan is also a writer of nonfiction, a photographer, a fly fisherman, and a boxer-in-training.

Jerry Jessee

Jerry Jessee is an assistant professor of the history of science and global history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His book project, Radiation Ecologies: Nuclear Fallout and the Birth of the Ecosphere, investigates how scientific research tracing nuclear fallout in the environment during the Cold War sparked a new era of global environmental consciousness, which helped usher in the modern environmental era. It is under contract with the University of Washington Press, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series.

Paul Krainak

Paul Krainak is a painter, critic, and professor emeritus at Bradley University where he served as art department chair for 10 years. He’s a former associate editor and corresponding editor of the New Art Examiner and Artpapers. He’s contributed essays on contemporary art that focus on the aesthetics of place to numerous journals, exhibition catalogues and academic presses. These include the Kemper Museum of Art in St. Louis, The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University Press, Sculpture Magazine, and Afterimage.

Krainak is the founder and director of the former Inland Visual Studies Center at Bradley University. As of fall 2022 he will be a Madison, Wisconsin, resident.

Mitch Larson

A native of Madison, Dr. Mitch Larson holds a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is an interdisciplinary scholar, researching and publishing primarily on the intersections between business and management activities and historical change. He has taught both in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom; in the UK, Dr. Larson became very involved with graduate school research students and led his school’s PhD program as faculty research degree coordinator for three years. He has hosted two international conferences, served as associate editor of two academic journals, and peer-reviews manuscripts for publication in his field.

Robert Lundberg

Robert Lundberg earned a JD from the UW-Madison Law School and an MS from the Nelson Institute. Lundberg’s academic interests focus on legal issues of water allocation and usage, and the interaction between infrastructure and surrounding environments. His artistic practice utilizes photography, video, and musical performance to investigate these interests.

He is also a graduate fellow of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and an organizer of the Terra Incognita Art Series. Additionally, he is an internationally performing musician. He holds a BFA from The New School in Jazz Performance.

Curt Meine

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist and historian with an interdisciplinary academic background in environmental science and the humanities, having earned his MS and PhD in land resources through UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute. He serves as senior fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation and the Center for Humans and Nature; as research associate with the International Crane Foundation; and as adjunct associate professor at the UW-Madison.

His research and professional conservation work have focused on the evolution of conservation ideas, science, policy, and practice, grounded in his studies of the life and work of Aldo Leopold. He has authored and edited several books and served on the editorial boards of the journals Conservation Biology and Environmental Ethics.

At UW-Madison he is an advisor to the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, the Global Health Institute, the Indigenous Arts and Sciences Earth Partnership, and the NSF-IGERT Novel Ecosystems Program.

Daegan Miller

Daegan Miller is a writer and historian who focuses on the 19th-century American landscape and the people who dreamed it into being. He writes about land surveyors and their maps; wilderness and anti-slavery communities; landscape photography and image theory; anarchists, socialists, and the communes they built. He writes about trees in American culture, about Henry David Thoreau, and about the culture of capitalism.

He earned his PhD from Cornell University, and was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at UW-Madison from 2013-2015. His work has appeared in a variety of venues, from literary magazines to academic journals, and includes The American Historical Review, 3:AM Magazine, Stone Canoe, Environmental Humanities and others. His first book is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2017.

Troy Reeves

Since June 2007, Troy Reeves has led oral history activities at UW-Madison archives. In that job, Reeves has overseen the collection and curation of oral history on UW-Madison history topics, including the campus’ rich environmental history. He has also spoken to faculty, staff, students, and alumni about oral history in general and specific oral history projects. As one of two full-time professional oral historians, Reeves has and will discuss oral history with whoever, wherever, whenever.

William Robichaud

William Robichaud is Global Wildlife Conservation’s Saola conservation program coordinator. He is also the founding coordinator of the Saola Working Group of the IUCN SSC’s Asian Wild Cattle Specialist Group. He has been working on wildlife conservation and research in Southeast Asia for nearly 25 years. William Robichaud is a native of Wisconsin. He holds degrees in zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. and the University of British Columbia.

Maxi Schreiber

Maxi Schreiber is a lecturer at the Department of Art and Architectural History at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. She received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2016. Her first book, Ancient Egyptian Architecture and its Reception in Modernity: Architecture in Germany 1900–1933, was published by Gebr. Mann in 2018. Her fields of research include the reception of Ancient Egyptian architecture and historiography on German modern architecture as well as public library architecture. She is currently working on her second book about public library architecture in trans-Atlantic comparison (1880s–2010s).

Heather Swan

Heather Swan has a PhD in English with a CHE minor and an MFA in poetry from UW-Madison. Her interests include environmental literature, environmental justice, animal studies, contemporary American poetry and fiction, post-colonial studies, visual studies, and insect poetics. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Cream City Review, Poet Lore, Iris, Basalt, and Green Humanities Review, and her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in ISLE, Resilience, Edge Effects, and Aeon.

Her book, Healing Bees, a work of narrative nonfiction about the interdisciplinary response to pollinator decline, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press. She is currently a lecturer at UW-Madison, where she is teaching environmental literature and writing. She is also a beekeeper.

Alberto Vargas

Alberto Vargas has worked at the intersection of environment and development for the past 35 years. As an undergraduate he studied agronomy at the Monterrey Technological Institute in Querétaro, México, and he earned a PhD in land resources and forestry from UW-Madison. He was one of founders of an eco-development research center in Quintana Roo, México, and he has worked in global environmental policy in Washington, D.C. and as policy analyst for the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program. He currently teaches a seminar on sustainable development for GNIES. He is also the associate director/faculty associate of the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies program at UW–Madison.

Steel Wagstaff

Steel Wagstaff has a PhD in English and a master’s degree in library and information studies from UW-Madison. His graduate research focused on the Objectivist poets and applied principles of ecocriticism to explore the work of Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, and others. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and works as the educational product manager for Pressbooks, a small Canadian company that makes open-source publishing software.