Previous Work

In the years following my PhD, I focused on a program of work that dealt substantially with questions of green governmentality. This term refers to the analytical framework that seeks to understand how various authorities have exerted themselves through productive (rather than only repressive) forms of power. More specifically, I have focused on how this notion could be usefully applied to questions of the environment, generating particular ways of knowing about nature, while eschewing others.

Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power

This book, based on my PhD dissertation but significantly revised for publication, proposed that Foucault’s articulation of governmentality: 1. Needed to include the biophysical world from which all things spring; 2. Required a recognition and articulation of different kinds of governmentality. As such, the book offers a tour through iconic arenas of cultural production in the United States: the American Museum of Natural History, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Yellowstone National Park, and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. What I suggest in this book is different manifestations of green governmentality are present – scientific, aesthetic, moral and corporate – all of which find union in the commodification of nature. 

Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research

This book examines the challenges and possibilities of conducting cultural environmental history research today. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. The book examines: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history yet dominate archival records; how to attend to the non-visual senses when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; how to decolonize research in and beyond the archives; and how effectively to use sources and means of communication made available in the digital age.

Historical Animal Geographies

Arguing that historical analysis is an important, yet heretofore largely underexplored dimension of scholarship in animal geographies, this book seeks to define historical animal geography as the exploration of how spatially situated human–animal relations have changed through time. This volume centers on the changing relationships among people, animals, and the landscapes they inhabit, taking a spatio-temporal approach to animal studies. Foregrounding the assertion that geography matters as much as history in terms of how humans relate to animals, this collection offers unique insight into the lives of animals past, how interrelationships were co-constructed amongst and between animals and humans, and how nonhuman actors came to make their own worlds. This collection of chapters explores the rich value of work at the contact points between three sub-disciplines, demonstrating how geographical analyses enrich work in historical animal studies, that historical work is important to animal geography, and that recognition of animals as actors can further enrich historical geographic research.