Conference
“Two Kingdoms: New Perspectives on Flora and Fauna in Environmental History”
A Northeast Regional Conference
Burke Auditorium, Kroon Hall
Yale University, Saturday, April 14, 2012
New Haven, Connecticut
Graduate Student Presenters * Faculty Chairs and Commentators
Abtracts for each paper are also available.
Additional biographical information coming soon.
Nadia Berenstein, University of Pennsylvania, "'They Rush Blindly at the Light at the Expense of Their Lives': Bird Collisions, Urban Illumination, and ‘Tragedies of Migration’ in New York City and Philadelphia, 1887-1915"
Nadia Berenstein is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she calls the History & Sociology of Science department home. She is interested in encounters between humans and other organisms, species extinction, specimen collecting and display, and urban environmental histories. She has recently begun a project tracing the history of artificial grape flavor in the United States. A former English major, she loves a good animal story, even if it has a sad ending.
Helen Curry, Yale University, "King-sized cabbages and miracle marigolds: creating crops and flowers with a chemical, 1937-1950"
Helen Curry is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University, where her studies focus on the history of the twentieth-century life sciences, as well as the histories of agriculture and environment. Her dissertation, "Accelerating Evolution, Engineering Life: American Agriculture and Technologies of Genetic Modification, 1925-1960," offers a history of the development, application, and public reception in the United States of early means of manipulating the genes and chromosomes of agricultural plants. She is a 2011-12 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, and currently resides in Philadelphia where she is a visiting fellow of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. In September 2012 she will begin as University Lecturer in the History of Modern Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge.
Todd Holmes, Yale University (co-organizer)
Todd Holmes is a History PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on 20th century U.S. political, economic, and labor history, as well as California and the American West. He is the author of several articles on American politics, California agribusiness, and environmental issues in the Far West, and has served as the Graduate Assistant for Yale’s Agrarian Studies Program for the last three years. His dissertation explores shifts in party politics and political economy during the United Farm Workers’ movement.
John S. Lee, Harvard University, "Protect the Pines, Punish the People: The Social Implications of Forest Conservation in Pre-Industrial Korea, 1600-1876"
John Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, specializing in the environmental history of early modern Korea. Originally from southern California, he received his master’s degree in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard in 2009 and began his Ph.D. the same year. In addition to his current focus on the various dimensions of forest conservation in early modern Korea, John is broadly interested in early modern forest conservation and deforestation as an avenue for pursing comparative world history.
Tamar Novick, University of Pennsylvania, "Holy Cow! On Milk Yield, Fertility and the Creation of Plenty in Palestine/Israel"
Tamar Novick is a fourth year graduate student at the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Tamar holds a dual BA in Cognitive Science and in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the history and anthropology of health and the body, environmental history, and their intersections with nationalism and colonialism. She is also interested in the bidirectional relations between humans and animals in the production of medical knowledge. Her dissertation project is currently titled "Milk & Honey: The Technomystical Creation of a Holy Land, 1900-1960." In this project, she examines the efforts to make plenty in Palestine/Israel, and how people used science and technology to revive a mystical past.
Rachel Rothschild, Yale University (closing panel moderator, co-organizer)
Rachel Rothschild is a third year graduate student in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. Her academic interests include the history of earth and environmental science in 20th century Europe and America, particularly connections between environmental science, public policy and law. Rothschild is currently working on several projects related to the development of ecology, atmospheric science, and climatology after World War II. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and intends to seek ways for her scholarship to find wider application among government officials and the public.
Eric Rutkow, Yale University (co-organizer)
Eric Rutkow is a second year graduate student in the Department of History at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, he earned a J.D. from Harvard and worked as a lawyer. His current research interests include environmental history, legal history, and the U.S. and the world. He is the author of American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (Scribner, 2012).
Shira Shmu’ely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "'The Flying Death': Curare Travels from American Jungles to the British Laboratorie"
Shira Shmu’ely studies the intersection between legal history and history of science, and the history and theory of human-animal relations. She holds an LL.B and LL.M degrees from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.
Sarah Sutton, Brandeis University, "Rethinking land and labor: Shifting family values and the transition to industrialized dairy farming in New England"
Sarah Sutton is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University. She is currently writing a dissertation that explores the intertwined histories of milk consumption and dairy farming in New England from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Her research interests include agricultural and environmental history, and she is currently teaching a first-year writing seminar at Brandeis.
Kristoffer Whitney, University of Pennsylvania, "Domesticating Nature?: Surveillance and Conservation of Migratory Shorebirds in the 20th Century"
Kristoffer received a B.S. in environmental management and technology in 1998 from the Rochester Institute of Technology, taught ecology in a Kazakhstani university through the Peace Corps, worked as a professional environmental consultant and educator, and joined the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. He is currently completing a doctorate at Penn as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Broadly interested in environmental history and policy, his forthcoming dissertation on the red knot/horseshoe crab controversy in the Delaware estuary explores the links between wildlife biology, commercial fisheries, and endangered species policy.
Tom Wickman, Harvard University, "Great Snows and Big Animals: Moose and Other Ungulates on the Contested Maritime Peninsula in the Little Ice Age, 1675-1700"
Tom Wickman is a doctoral candidate in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. His dissertation, “Snowshoe Country: The Indian Northeast in the Little Ice Age, 1620-1727,” is a political and environmental history of winter in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Northeast. The project shows how Native American family hunting bands creatively drew power from winter environments during a century of colonization and climate change and how over time English settlers increasingly contested Indians’ winter mobility.
Faculty Chairs and Commentators
Shafqat Hussain is assistant professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Shafqat obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, USA in 2009. He is from Pakistan and has worked in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan for Aga Khan Rural Support Program in Skardu and IUCN – Washington as a Ford Foundation Policy Fellow. Shafqat Hussain is interested in understanding how human societies and environment shape each other. He is particularly interested in how geo-political and intellectual changes effect the perception of nature, and human society’s relationship with it.
Daniel Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History and Professor of History of Medicine, of American Studies, and of Law (adjunct) at Yale University. Kevles' research interests include: the interplay of science and society past and present; the history of science in America; the history of modern physics; the history of modern biology, scientific fraud and misconduct; the history of innovation and intellectual property in living organisms; the history of environmentalism; and the history of science, arms, and the state. His teaching areas are the history of modern science, including genetics, physics, science in American society, and U.S. history since 1940.
Alan Mikhail is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the 2009-11 Roger Owen Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the 2011 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication from Yale University. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, History Compass, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Akhbār al-Adab, Wijhāt Naẓar, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about the changing relationships between humans and animals in Ottoman Egypt and completing an edited volume on the environmental history of the Middle East, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
Peter Perdue has a Ph.D. (1981) from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.(Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987) and China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005). He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history. His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award and the James A. Levitan Prize at MIT. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
Sarah Phillips is an assistant professor of history at Boston University, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century U.S. history and American environmental history. She is the author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge, 2007). Other publications include articles in Environmental History and Agricultural History, and anthology chapters on transatlantic agrarian history, the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, and the conservation and environmental policy of state governors. She is currently working on a history of the foreign policy generated by the post-WWII agricultural surplus.
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, where she teaches courses in British history, environmental history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, forthcoming).
Aaron Sachs is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Envionmentalism (2006). He teaches courses on environmental history, commodification and consumerism, and the practice of writing history.
Paul Sabin is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Yale University. Sabin's research and teaching focus on United States environmental history, energy politics, and political and economic history, including natural resource development in the American West and overseas. Professor Sabin’s book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Economy, 1900-1940 (2005), examines how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation. He has written scholarly articles on environmental and legal history and U.S. overseas expansion and popular pieces on energy politics and leadership development.
Steven Stoll is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, where he teaches environmental history, capitalism, American Indians, and agrarian societies. He writes about the ways people think about resources, capital, and how the human economy functions within the larger economy of Earth. His books include Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) and The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (2008). He is at work on a book about the ordeal of peasant societies in North America.
