Postcards from the Field

For the second year, the Edge Effects editorial board asked graduate students affiliated with the Center for Culture, History, and Environment to send us summer “postcards” from the field. This year, Lauren Ayers, Kara Cromwell, Robert Lundberg, William Voinot-Baron, and Kate Wersan share their summer research and travel adventures.

Click on each postcard to enlarge.

Lauren Ayers

This summer, Lauren Ayers visited the town of Kennecott, which her advisor, William Cronon, visited and wrote about twenty-five years ago in his essay “Kennecott Journey.”

Kara Cromwell

Kara Cromwell was in Gothic, Colorado, this summer for dissertation research on aquatic parasite ecology, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Robert Lundberg

This summer, Robert Lundberg was in Europe to play eighteen concerts with the band Skeletons.

William Voinot-Baron

William Voinot-Baron traveled to southwest Alaska in June to conduct preliminary dissertation research on subsistence fishing, funded by a Graduate Student Research and Travel Grant from the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, as well as a Buckingham Award in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Anthropology.

Kate Wersan

Kate Wersan is in Delaware for dissertation research on the environmental history of American timekeeping, funded by the Hagley Museum and Library’s Henry Belin Du Pont Dissertation Fellowship.

Featured image: CCO Public Domain

Lauren Ayers is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying American environmental history. She is broadly interested in technology transfer and agricultural development abroad. Recently, she completed a master’s thesis on the origins of the Green Revolution in Mexico. Contact.

Kara Cromwell studies host-parasite interactions as a Ph.D. student in the Zoology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work investigates both causes and consequences of parasitism, asking how environmental change and animal behavior interact to influence where epidemics occur, and how parasites affect food web interactions. In addition to parasite ecology, she is interested in how people perceive the creepy, crawly, or “gross” elements of biodiversity and tries to find creative ways to communicate about nature’s unseemly side. Website. Contact. 

Robert Lundberg makes music, takes photos, builds things, and thinks about and drinks water. He has performed a wide range of music throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His photography is currently focused on the interaction of “wild” and human-built spaces. He earned his B.F.A. from The New School in Jazz Performance and is pursuing a J.D. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Law and Environmental Studies. Website. Contact.

William Voinot-Baron is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation research focuses on how fisheries management along the Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska is affecting Alaska Native lives and livelihoods, and how fishing entails more than the catching of fish itself, but also the social and moral relations of care that are tied up in it. Contact.

Kate Wersan is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History.  Specializing in the environmental and cultural history of the United States, her research examines the environmental history of American timekeeping practices from 1660 to 1920, exploring the tangled truth that in order to know where you are, you also have to know when you are. Website. Contact.