I'm a PhD candidate in the history of science at Princeton University, where I study the history of the life sciences and environmental politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My work engages with the histories of science, technology, and political thought, environmental history, and North American Indigenous history.
In the past, my research has examined how ecological restoration took shape as a concept, research agenda, and set of management practices in the Midwestern United States. This 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. Recently, I've continued writing on wild rice restoration as a form of Anishinaabe worldmaking and on the associational politics of twentieth-century prairie ecology. My doctoral dissertation examines growing doubts regarding a fundamental balance in nature among ecologists and evolutionary biologists in the twentieth century, tracing the consequences of this shift in international environmental thought and politics.
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.