Editorial Board

Red brick building

The Edge Effects editorial board is composed of graduate students and a faculty advisor from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment.

Managing Editor

Rebecca Laurent (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology. Her dissertation work is focused on the political economy and queer ecology of houseplants. Her previous research has focused on oil-state entanglement and the repression of environmental activism. Contact.

The Managing Editor position of Edge Effects is generously supported by the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Faculty Advising Editor

James T. Spartz, Ph.D. (he/him) is a writer and editor with the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison. He works at the intersection of economic inequality, poverty, communication, and community well-being. He also has strong interests in decolonialist, place-based creative nonfiction. James spent six years as a professor of environmental communication at a small, private, environmental college in Maine where he developed and taught courses including Environmental Communication, Forests and Society, Environmental Writing, and Ecomusicology and Place. His collaborative work is found in publications such as Environmental CommunicationJournal of Environmental PsychologyMiddle West ReviewRoutledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, and the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Contact.


Editorial Board

Laleh Ahmad (she/her) is a master’s student in the environment and resources program. Her research focuses on disaster preparedness, resource management, and environmental governance in Pakistan. She is particularly interested in the spatial legacies of colonialism and critical development studies. Laleh is originally from Karachi, Pakistan, and worked in Washington, D.C., before coming to Madison. In her free time, you might find Laleh writing, hanging out with her cats, or haunting her local bookstore. Contact.


Kanika Ahuja (she/her) is a poet and educator from New Delhi, India. She is a first year PhD Student in Literary Studies focusing on contemporary poetics and craft as criticism. The winner of the 2023 Thomas H. Scholl and Elizabeth Boyd Thompson Poetry Prize (Purdue University) and the AWP Intro Journals Project 2022, her poems appear, or are forthcoming, at Poetry Daily, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Contact.


woman with brunette hair sitting cross legged on grass, dressed in navy tank top and blue pants. Trees in the background.

Tessa Archambault (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the French department. Her work explores representations of the environment in French and Francophone literature and film from the end of the colonial era to more contemporary works. She is interested in tracing individual and collective shifts in human perceptions of nature and how these shifts are implicated in relationships to the more-than-human world. Contact.


Dylan Couch (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in literary studies. He is interested in the environmental humanities, food studies, climate fiction, and representations of apocalypse. Two fun facts: he has never broken a bone (knock on wood), and he took his first ever plane flight in 2022. Contact.


Close up photo of a young woman with long dark hair and a flowered dress

Kuhelika Ghosh (she/her) is a literary studies Ph.D. student in the English department. Her current research interests lie in the intersection of postcolonial literature and the environmental humanities, particularly considering the idea of posthumanism in the Anthropocene through an affective lens. Contact.


Ellie Kincaid (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in English literary studies. They’re interested in queer ecologies and trans sports studies, inspired by a love of being queer, in community, and outside. They’re from North Carolina, where they grew up in Chapel Hill and got their BA at Davidson College. Contact.


Kayleigh Lobdell (they/them) is a PhD student in literary studies, with previous Masters in English Literature (2023) and Adolescent English Education (2020). Their work is in contemporary women’s and Native American speculative/dystopian fiction, and in particular, they explore how issues of fertility, race, the environment, and “child protection” policies intersect within and beyond fiction. Contact.


Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey (he/him) is a Colombian historian specializing in the socio-cultural and environmental history of global tobacco. His research interests include political ecology and environmental justice, particularly the multiple nuances in the scales of socio-environmental extractivist phenomena. Contact.


Audio Editors

Tessa Archambault

Dylan Couch

Ellie Kincaid

Kayleigh Lobdell


Previous editorial board members of Edge Effects include: Bailey Albrecht, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Adam Behrman, Nicole Bennett, Kristen Billings, Jake Blanc, Rachel Boothby (Managing Editor), Helen J. Bullard, Charles Carlin, Oindrila Chattopadhyay, William Cronon (Faculty Advising Editor), Doron Darnov, Daniel Grant, W. Nathan Green, Spring Greeney, Carly Griffith, Rachel Gross, Brian Hamilton (Managing Editor), Elizabeth Hennessy (Faculty Advising Editor), Addie Hopes (Managing Editor), Justyn Huckleberry, Ben Iuliano (Managing Editor), Nathan Jandl (Managing Editor), Mary-Kate Keran, Juniper Lewis, Weishun Lu (Managing Editor), Adam Mandelman (Managing Editor), Bri Meyer (Managing Editor), Rudy Molinek, Jessica Montez, Samm Newton, Eric Nost, Travis Olson, Mario Ortiz-Robles (Faculty Advising Editor), Laura Perry (Managing Editor), Prerna Rana, Carl Sack, Clare Sullivan, Rebecca Summer (Managing Editor), John Suval, Sara Gabler Thomas, Emmanuel Urey, Stepha Velednitsky, Kate Wersan, Kaitlin Stack Whitney, Richelle Wilson (Managing Editor).


Featured image: Built in 1887, Science Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the home to the Edge Effects office. Image courtesy of the UW-Madison Collection.