I’m a PhD candidate in the history of science at Princeton University, where I study the interplay of ideas about natural order and governance since the mid-twentieth century. My work engages with the history of science, environmental and political history, and North American Indigenous history.
My M.A. thesis examined how ecological restoration took shape as a concept, research agenda, and set of management practices in the Midwestern United States. I focused on the history of efforts to manage the region’s characteristic grasses — prairie tallgrass, corn, and wild rice — and the competing ecological and political visions they have embodied. More recently, I’ve been writing on Ojibwe relational restoration as a form of world-making and on the evolving ideals and techniques of public land management in the Corn Belt. My prospective dissertation project, Chaos Ecology: Science, Governance, and the End of Natural Order, will examine how late twentieth-century ecologists reimagined nature as dynamic and unpredictable and trace the consequences of this shift across scientific, political, and humanistic thought.
Before starting at Princeton, I graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in History and a background in ecological research. I went on to work as an energy analyst and climate policy advocate in Minneapolis for several years before completing an M.A. in History at Trent University in Ontario.
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“Conservation in the Corn State: Agribusiness, Ecosystem Services, and the Transformation of Iowa Public Land Management, 1950–1990”
Presenter and panel co-organizer at the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, April 2025.
“Sovereignty through Stewardship: Wild Rice, Minnesota Ojibwe Resurgence, and the Politics of Relational Restoration”
Technologies of Sovereignty Graduate Conference, Columbia University, February 2025.
“Temporal Recipe Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household”
Princeton University Early Modern History Workshop. October 3, 2024.
“Restoration, Reciprocity, and Rice: How Minnesota Ojibwe Governments and Activists Reclaimed Resource Management”
Princeton University History of Science Program Seminar. September 2024.
“In Search of the Unit of Ecological Community: Prairie Restoration and the Intermediate Geography of the American Midwest”
Princeton University History of Science Program Seminar. March 2024.
“Theory and Practice in the Prairie: Plant Community Structure and the Foundations of Restoration Ecology”
History of Science Society Annual Conference, November 2022.
“A Tragedy in Common: H. Scott Gordon, the Fisherman’s Problem, and the Rationalizing High Modernism of Cold War Bioeconomics”
McGill–Queen’s Graduate History Conference, March 2022.
“‘He was on Your Side and You Knew It’: A Profile of Harvey Stork, Professor of Botany and Founder of the Carleton Arboretum”
Public Lecture at Carleton College, May 2019.