Gregg Mitman

current PhD students

Michitake Aso

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of Interest: environmental history; history of science; Southeast Asian studies

Current Projects: Currently working on a dissertation entitled “Colonial Ecologies: Environment, Health, and Politics in French Indochina, 1890-1940″, which focuses on environmental change and human health on the rubber plantations of southern Vietnam.

Peter G. Boger

UW Madison, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

Fields of Interest: environmental history; environmental film; animal studies; zoo studies; ecology; 20th-century U.S.

Current Projects: Recently completed a master’s thesis entitled “‘A Pandemonium of Trumpets, Rattles, Croaks, and Cries’: Teaching Environmental Education in a Cross-Cultural Context,” which examined the effectiveness of Americans teaching environmental education to Russian students at a privately managed nature preserve in Siberia and the challenges of designing a cross-cultural curriculum to address Russian adolescents’ unique environmental worldviews. Recently completed a short film entitled “On the Origin of Subspecies,” which considers how modern people more often interact with their “ideas of animals” rather than animals themselves. Currently working on revising this project for submission at environmental film festivals. Also working on expanding the ideas from this project into a dissertation about human-animal interactions in modern society and related challenges for conservation.

Meredith Beck Sayre

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of interest: environmental history; history of science; history of natural history; Native American studies

Current Projects: Recently completed a master’s thesis entitled “Gardeners of God: The
Jesuit project of cultivating soils and souls in New France, 1632-1674,” which explores how the metaphor of cultivation shaped Jesuit interaction with the physical landscape and indigenous peoples of North America.

Andrew Stuhl

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of interest: North American environmental history, history of science, natural and cultural resource management, marine environmental history, ecology, use of history in decision-making, leadership studies, environmental and outdoor education.

Current projects: Beginning a dissertation project on the environmental and cultural history of resource extraction in the Western Arctic (Canada’s Beaufort Sea-Mackenzie River Delta Region). This research will analyze encounters between Inuvialuit natives and non-native whalers, traders, trappers, and oil developers over the last two centuries to better understand land-use change, knowledge production, cultural conflict in the area. Recently completed “Considering the Oyster: An Environmental History of Oyster Management in Virginia,” an MA thesis in the UW Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies which examined the ways disease outbreaks in oysters and people during the 20th century shaped relationships among scientists, resource managers, oystermen, and the oystering landscape in southern Chesapeake Bay.

Megan Raby

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of Interest: history of science; environmental history; history of field science, natural history collecting and mapping; 19th and 20th century U.S. and transnational

Current Projects: Recently completed a master’s paper entitled “Making Science Travel: Geographies of Collection and the American Ornithologists’ Union Code of Nomenclature,” on the relationship between Westward expansion and naming and collecting practices in 19th century American ornithology. Currently researching natural history surveys and the study of animal distributions more broadly.

Amrys Williams

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of Interest: environmental history; history of science; history of technology; agricultural/rural history; ecology; 20th-century U.S.

Current Projects: Recently completed a master’s thesis entitled “Head, Heart, Hands, and Health: 4-H, Ecology, and Conservation in Wisconsin, 1930-1940,” which examined the ways in which Wisconsin’s 4-H club leaders drew on the teachings of ecology to inform a holistic approach to rural reform during the Depression and World War II. Currently working on expanding this project into a dissertation on 4-H in the U.S. and abroad.

Anna Zeide

UW Madison, History of Science Department

Fields of Interest: environmental history; history of science; environmental and science education; gender and science; food history

Current Projects: I recently completed a master’s thesis entitled “Shades of Gray: Conservation Education and Women’s Activism in 1930s Wisconsin,” which focuses on a 1935 bill mandating the teaching of conservation in Wisconsin public schools and on the gender- and professionalization-based conflicts that arose around the bill. More broadly, I am interested in how different groups create and assert their authority over a given area of expertise, whether in the field, the school, the lab, the home, or the kitchen.