Faculty and Academic Staff Associates

Ian Baird

Geography
ibaird@wisc.edu

Ian Baird is a professor in the Department of Geography and director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His interests are varied, and include the political ecology of hydropower dam development in the Mekong Region, economic land concessions in Laos and Cambodia, the concept of indigeneity in Asia, the history of political and military conflict in mainland Southeast Asia, and nature-society-politics in upland parts of mainland Southeast Asia, especially amongst the Brao and the Hmong.

Anna Bierbrauer

Planning and Landscape Architecture
abierbrauer@wisc.edu

Anna is a collaborator, teacher, and designer. Her research combines political ecology, environmental history, critical physical geography, and geospatial data into the landscape architecture and planning professions to understand current and historical equity issues related to urban landscapes. Anna’s recent dissertation, “Concealing, Forgetting, and Recalling Aridity: Denver’s Garden System, 1902-1980,” explored how urban vegetation expressed the political, economic, and social powers that controlled water infrastructure development to produce and reproduce racialized landscape typologies across the city of Denver.

Her landscape architecture and design projects have stretched from a mobile education station about stormwater to urban streetscape and green infrastructure designs, and from federal forest management policy to historical garden maintenance plans and residential gardens. She enjoys working collaboratively to further interdisciplinary dialogue about changing landscapes, our connection to the world around us, and long ignored histories.

Beatriz Botero

Integrated Liberal Studies
blbotero@wisc.edu

Beatriz L. Botero has a PhD in contemporary Hispanic American literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a PhD in psychoanalysis in which she graduated summa cum laude from the Department of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid Spain. She specializes in Latin American novels, psychoanalysis and cultural studies.

She is the author of Identidad Imaginada: Novelística Colombiana del Siglo XXI (Pliegos Editores, 2020) and editor of Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels: Psychoanalysis and Gender Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Botero’s research places special emphasis on identity, the body, and social conflict. Also has worked on these issues in relation to contemporary visual art.

Botero is the winner of the 2023 CLASP Junior Faculty Teaching Award.

William Brockliss

Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
brockliss@wisc.edu

Will Brockliss is the director of CHE. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, where he teaches courses on the Greeks, Romans, and the Natural Environment, and Ancient Monsters.

Will has published Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment (Harvard/Center for Hellenic Studies 2019), as well as articles on landscapes of war, ecology in ancient texts, and monstrosity. He is currently writing a book on horror in ancient epic.

Joshua Calhoun

English
joshua.calhoun@wisc.edu

Joshua Calhoun is an associate professor in the Department of English whose most recent work explores the ecopoetic interplay between literary ideas and the physical forms they are made to take as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.

In his first book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, & Ecology in Renaissance England (forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press), Calhoun argues that the flora, fauna, and mineralia from which a Renaissance text — or a clay tablet, or a birch bark map, or an iPhone — is made are legible, significant elements of its poetic form. His work draws on scholarly as well as journalistic training (as an intern at Outside Magazine), and his commitment to questions about conservation, land use, and wilderness are deeply informed by his experiences growing up in the Adirondacks.

Eric Carson

Division of Extension and Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey
eric.carson@wisc.edu

Eric Carson is a professor in the UW–Madison Division of Extension and a geomorphologist at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. His research, teaching, and outreach center around the landscape-forming processes of rivers and glaciers over timescales ranging from hundreds to tens of millions of years. This background makes the never-glaciated Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin the ideal natural laboratory and venue for his thought.

Nadia Chana

Ethnomusicology
nchana@wisc.edu

Nadia Chana is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. Her recent dissertation — On Listening on Indigenous Land: Method, Context, Crisis — relied on a variety of methods, including multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in northern Alberta and the California Bay Area, to consider how singing and listening become critical tools for building a felt relationship with a more-than-human world.

More generally, Nadia is interested in voice (audible and metaphoric), racialization, embodiment, practice-based ways of knowing, Indigenous-settler relations, Bay Area spirituality, nonhuman agency, and experimental and collaborative ethnography. While Nadia situates her work within music studies, thinkers in critical Indigenous studies and feminist science studies have often been her guiding stars.

Gabrielle Cornish

School of Music
gcornish@wisc.edu

Gabrielle Cornish is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research broadly considers sound and everyday life in the Soviet Union. In particular, her monograph-in-progress, Socialist Noise: Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin, traces the intersections between music, technology, and the politics of socialist modernity during the Cold War. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the American Musicological Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Slavic review. A committed public scholar, she has bylines in Slate, The Washington Post, and The New York Times and has appeared as a guest to discuss Russian history, culture, and politics on NBC Nightly News, BBC World Service Television, and BBC Radio Newsday.

Ingrid Diran

English
diran@wisc.edu

Ingrid Diran is an assistant professor of English and environmental humanities at UW-Madison whose teaching and research examine the relations between formations of capital and their corresponding deformations of life. Her book project examines the way in which ideas of ecological and economic limits have become entangled, and how this entanglement intersects with racial capitalism and its traditions of resistance.

Eve Emshwiller

Botany
emshwiller@wisc.edu

Eve Emshwiller is an associate 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. Members of her lab also research manoomin (wild-rice) harvest traditions, evolution of feral wild mustard in Mexico under different traditional management practices, factors that affect the loss or maintenance of oca clonal diversity, organic acids in oca, and the origins of domestication in Chenopodium. She teaches UW-Madison’s first ethnobotany course and is now also teaching “Plants and Humans.”

Sarah Ensor

English
sarah.ensor@wisc.edu

Sarah Ensor is an assistant professor of English at UW-Madison whose teaching and research focus on ecocriticism, queer studies, American literature, and various intersections thereof. She is currently finishing a book on queer environmental ethics in the absence of futurity, which reads queer sites of provisionality in order to trace how temporariness and (apparent) futurelessness can engender, rather than preclude, forms of commitment, community, intimacy, and care. Her second book, tentatively titled Queer Fallout: Nuclear Families and Other Toxic Kin, explores fallout as a material, relational, and methodological category that spans queer and environmental thought.

Anna Gade

Environmental Studies
amgade@wisc.edu

Anna M. Gade is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, where she teaches courses in environmental humanities. She is an historian of religions who specializes in Islam and Southeast Asia. Her recent work in environmental humanities and ethics includes Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations (Columbia University Press, 2019). She is currently completing a forthcoming book on environmental ethics in interdisciplinary environmental studies.

Ruth Goldstein

Gender and Women’s Studies
ruth.goldstein@wisc.edu

Ruth Goldstein is an assistant professor in the gender and women’s studies department at UW-Madison. Her teaching and research interests converge along the lines of environmental racism, conceptions of gendered care for “Mother” Earth and what it means to decolonize ecological knowledge. She is working on a book — Life in Traffic: Women, Plants and Gold Along the Interoceanic Road — with UC Press.

Claudio Gratton

Entomology
cgratton@wisc.edu

Claudio Gratton’s research is broadly focused on understanding the relationship between land use and the conservation of insects both beneficial to people (pollinators and predators), and those that are pests of crops. In particular, his lab has been studying how agriculture influences the services that nature provides to people via the conservation of biodiversity.

Recently they have been exploring ways to make science a more integral part of the decision-making processes that ultimately shape what people do in our landscapes to affect not only crops, but also the environment and, ultimately, society more broadly.

Rachel Gurney

Dr. Rachel Gurney is an environmental sociologist with a background in journalism, environmental science, and sociology. Her current research focuses on climate adaptation, socio-political dimensions of climate change, and food insecurity. Rachel specializes in interdisciplinary research bridging social and natural sciences, teaching environmental sociology, and communicating research to the public. She has years of experience in the environmental field, including advocacy and outreach for national and international environmental organizations, teaching and research, and publishing and editing social science environmental research for a variety of audiences and publication platforms.

Elizabeth Hennessy

History, Nelson Institute
ehennessy2@wisc.edu

Elizabeth Hennessy is associate professor of world environmental history in the history department and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. She is also affiliated with the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies program (LACIS). Trained as a geographer, she works at the intersection of political ecology, science and technologies studies, animal studies, and environmental history.

Her main research project focuses on the most iconic species of the Galápagos Islands, giant tortoises, to trace intertwined transnational histories of capitalist development, evolutionary science, and conservation in the archipelago. She teaches courses on both global and Latin American environmental history as well as the role of animals in world history.

Leah Horowitz

Nelson Institute, Civil Society and Community Studies
lhorowitz@wisc.edu

As a critical cultural geographer, Leah Horowitz’s research focuses on conflicts over environmental governance, involving local communities, governments at various scales, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and grassroots groups. Ultimately, her work aims to help find ways for all these stakeholders to work together toward environmental conservation. She has addressed these research goals through studies of mining activities and biodiversity conservation, primarily in New Caledonia, Malaysia, and the U.S.

Specifically, her research contributes to our understanding of the importance of relationships and networks and the crucial role emotions play within these in enabling and shaping various modes of environmental governance as well as resistance to them.

Sara Hotchkiss

Botany
shotchkiss@wisc.edu

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.

Robert Justin Hougham

Division of Extension
justin.hougham@wisc.edu

Dr. Justin Hougham (he/him/his) is a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he supports the delivery of a wide range of science education topics to K-12 students, graduate students, and in-service teachers. Justin’s scholarship is in the areas of place-based pedagogies, STEM education, and education for sustainability. Justin has taught 17 different undergraduate and graduate courses as well as instructed over 1,000 days in the field. He continues to teach courses, clinics, and trainings that develop pedagogies in experiential education.

Randall Jackson

Agronomy
rdjackson@wisc.edu

Randy Jackson’s research, teaching and engagement in grassland ecology explores how human management of agroecosystems influences their ability to build soils, retain nutrients, and enhance biodiversity, while providing for our wants and needs. He helps manage the 30-year-old Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial (WICST), which compares the environmental and economic performance of crops typical of upper Midwest agriculture.

He also directs Grassland 2.0, a five-year project working toward transforming grain-based agriculture to grassland-based agriculture in the upper Midwest to help stabilize climate, reduce flooding, clean water, and support biodiversity, while rebuilding thriving, vital rural communities.

Tomiko Jones

Art
ktjones@wisc.edu

Tomiko Jones is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Art Department. Jones’ photography and multidisciplinary installations explore social, cultural and geopolitical transitions, considering the twin crises of too much and too little in the age of climate change. Her current research, These Grand Places, is a socially engaged investigation of public land supported by a Grand Challenge Seed Grant through the School of Education. Her recent project Hatsubon is a memorial exhibition in photography, video and sculpture.

Jones was a resident artist at Museé Niépce, and a fellow at The Camargo Foundation, France. Jones received her MFA and certificate in museum studies from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has held several full-time teaching appointments in New Mexico, California and Colorado, including visiting artist/professor positions.

Richard Keller

Medical History and Bioethics
rckeller@wisc.edu

Rick Keller’s research lies at the intersection of the history and ethnography of European and global health. He is the author of Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (Chicago, 2015) and Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago, 2007), and is co-editor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke, 2011), Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités: Une comparaison Angleterre, Etats-Unis et France (Presses de l’EHESP, 2010), and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Life after Biopolitics” (2016).

He is currently at work on a global history of the environment, as well as a project on the links between disease ecology and changes in global consumer demand. Keller teaches courses on the historical and contemporary dimensions of European and international health.

Alexia Kulwiec

School for Workers
alexia.kulwiec@wisc.edu

Alexia Kulwiec’s research and teaching focuses on federal and state labor and employment laws, and the processes whereby labor may address disparities and justice in the workplace. Her research includes laws applicable to agriculture and food systems and the potential development of improved agricultural business models; study of working conditions along the U.S. food chain; and the potential benefit of domestic fair trade principles in mid-sized agriculture. She examines the work environment of food and agricultural workers, as well as the impact of U.S. agricultural policy on the viability on small, sustainable farm operations.

Maria Lepowsky

Anthropology
lepowsky@wisc.edu

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.

Reba Luiken

Horticulture
rluiken@wisc.edu

Reba Luiken (she/her/hers) is the director of Allen Centennial Gardens in the horticulture department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she connects learners of all ages to the natural world through different ways of knowing. She completed a dual degree in plant biology and religious studies and a PhD in the history of science, technology, and medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the history of the plant sciences and public communication of science. She is currently working on a project about botany nuns who shared their understanding of plants, science, and God with generations of young women.

John Nelson

Civil and Environmental Engineering
jsnelson4@wisc.edu

John Nelson is an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW–Madison and managing director for Global Infrastructure Asset Management LLC, an asset management firm specializing in sustainable infrastructure investments.

Previously, Nelson was CEO of Affiliated Engineers, and under his leadership, the engineering firm became nationally recognized for designing dynamic building systems and infrastructure for large and complicated projects.

He serves on a number of boards, including the Nelson Institute (as a member emeritus), CASB in the School of Business, and the UW Foundation. His training includes an MS in mechanical engineering from UW–Madison.

Larry Nesper

Anthropology
lnesper@wisc.edu

Larry Nesper is a professor of anthropology and American Indian studies, and has been at UW-Madison since 2002. He is the author of The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights (University of Nebraska Press, 2002). He has worked as a consultant for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, the Bad River and Lac du Flambeau Tribe.

Current research explores the development of tribal courts in Wisconsin and state court-tribal court relations. He teaches courses in American Indian ethnography and ethnohistory, Indians of the Western Great Lakes, anthropology of law, and American Indian social and political movements.

Mario Ortiz-Robles

English
mortizrobles@wisc.edu

Mario Ortiz-Robles is the Nancy C. Hoefs and Mellon-Morgridge Professor of English and Animal Studies. His teaching and research interests are situated at the intersection of 19th-century literature, literary theory, and animal studies.

He is currently at work on a book-length project that explores the long arc of literary naturalism in Britain and France to determine the extent to which the appropriation of nature as a literary trope conditions, or “naturalizes,” our fraught relation to animals.

Adena Rissman

Forest and Wildlife Ecology
arrissman@wisc.edu

Adena Rissman is a professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, and an affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the agroecology program, the Land Tenure Center, the La Follette Institute for Public Affairs, and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. Her research investigates the relationships between society and environment, focusing on conservation, ecosystem management, and resource use.

She examines forests, wildlife, rangelands, agriculture, and water resources both locally and nationally, through participatory research approaches. Her research centers around three themes:

1. Natural resource policy design, implementation, and evaluation
2. Ecological outcomes of resource policy and conservation strategies
3. Social and legal adaptation to environmental change

Sissel Schroeder

Anthropology
sissel.schroeder@wisc.edu

Sissel Schroeder is a professor of archaeology and the chair of 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.

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 midwestern and 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.

Kirk Sides

English and African Cultural Studies
ksides@wisc.edu

Kirk Sides is an assistant professor in English and an affiliate professor of African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A specialist in African environmental literatures and humanities, his current book manuscript, Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary, charts a long history of ecological thinking in African literatures from the start of twentieth century up to the present. He also facilitates a series of workshops called “Anthropocene Storytelling,” which employ speculative fiction and poetry as pedagogical and creative methods for thinking about planetary change. Kirk has been a visiting research scholar in the Humanities Institute at The Pennsylvania State University, as well as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.

Jen Rose Smith

Geography and American Indian Studies
jrsmith39@wisc.edu

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu [Eyak, Alaska Native]) is an assistant professor in the geography department and American Indian Studies Program. She studies coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges with a particular interest in ice-geographies.

James Spartz

Institute for Research on Poverty
jspartz@wisc.edu

James Spartz (he/him/his) is a writer and editor with the Institute for Research on Poverty. He works at the intersections of economic inequality, poverty, communication, and community well-being as well as having a strong interest in decolonial place-based humanities scholarship and praxis.

James spent several years as a professor of environmental communication at a rural, private, environmental college in Maine where he developed and taught courses including Environmental Communication, Forests and Society, Environmental Writing, and Ecomusicology and Place.

He received an MA from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and PhD through the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication.

Amy Stambach

Anthropology
amy.stambach@wisc.edu

Amy Stambach is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the African Studies Program. Her current book project examines the history of land tenure and cultural politics on Mount Kilimanjaro. She has worked for many years in East Africa and has served as external commentator to UNESCO and the United Nations Institute of Statistics.

Randy Stoecker

Community and Environmental Sociology
rstoecker@wisc.edu

Randy Stoecker is a professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an affiliate appointment in the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension Center for Community and Economic Development. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota, and an MS in counseling from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

He conducts trainings and speaks frequently on community organizing and development, participatory action research/evaluation, higher education community engagement strategies, and community information technology. He has facilitated numerous participatory action research projects, community technology projects, and empowerment evaluation processes with community development corporations, community-based leadership education programs, community organizing groups, and other non-profits across a wide range of issues and places, including hip-hop.

Randy has written extensively on community organizing and development and higher education engagement with community. In his spare time he is practicing to become an electric guitar luthier and writing a rock opera. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his life partner of 40 years and a standard poodle of eight years who refuses to act his age.