Featured Research: Landscapes, Physical and Metaphorical | National Humanities Center

Featured Research

Featured Research: Landscapes, Physical and Metaphorical

October 1, 2024

This month we highlight the research of Fellows from the class of 2024–25 whose projects explore how we relate to nature and how those relationships, in turn, shape how we think about ourselves.


Ashley Carse

Project: The Age of Mitigation: Global Shipping and a River on Life Support

Ashley Carse is associate professor of human and organizational development at Vanderbilt University. He is a cultural anthropologist focused on the intersection of culture, technology, and ecology. He has carried out long-term, community-based fieldwork in Panama, the southeastern United States, and, increasingly, along transnational transportation networks. He uses ethnographic and historical methods to study infrastructure projects (water systems, roads, canals, ports, etc.) as sites where communities debate priorities and make value-laden decisions about how the benefits and burdens of economic development will be distributed among people and ecologies.

As an NHC Fellow, he is working on a book that tells the story of how an average harbor deepening project in Savannah, Georgia, became a billion-dollar environmental mitigation megaproject that spanned an entire region. Through the story of Savannah, the book examines broader tensions inherent in an approach to environmental management that seeks to control environmental impacts by expanding the scope of technological interventions—by building more, rather than less.

Savannah Harbor Expansion Project map
The environmental mitigation plan designed to minimize the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project’s environmental impacts was more extensive and costly than the harbor deepening itself.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

My first book focused on the Panama Canal. In 2016, Panama expanded the canal, which meant that huge container ships could travel from Asia to the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Port cities scrambled to attract those megaships. Among the most visible was Savannah, where a harbor deepening project was predicted to have significant environmental impacts. Rather than reducing its scope, state institutions pursued an array of environmental mitigation interventions. Suddenly, port expansion also meant rerouting the river, replacing damaged wetlands, building an upriver fish passage, and installing an oxygen injection system. Beneath its technical veneer, environmental mitigation is an arena where experts and publics grapple with moral and philosophical questions, like: How should societies define the “acceptable limit” of economic development?

In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

I learned that contemporary economic globalization depends upon constantly excavating enormous volumes of underwater sediment from rivers, harbors, and waterways. This invisible work—dredging—is necessary to make our consumer goods cheap and readily available. When you buy something from Amazon, it has well-known implications for workers and local economies, and so on, but it also plays a role in reshaping the geomorphology of rivers and coastlines. (Dredging is underway 24 hours per day, 365 days per year in Savannah). These activities can have enormous implications for human communities and non-human life. And yet, when we talk about trade and economic exchange, we tend to focus on the flows of commodities rather than the construction of infrastructures and modification of environments that makes this frictionless exchange possible.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

In general, my research explores the intersection of technology, culture, and ecology. I am particularly interested in, and excited by, humanistic scholarship that opens up the cultural, moral, and philosophical problems that underpin technical domains. As an anthropologist, my goal is to make “boring things” interesting by uncovering their human dramas and conflicts. A lot of my work in this area has focused on developing the interdisciplinary field of infrastructure studies, which bridges anthropology, architecture, English, geography, history, and science and technology studies. In my current work, I’ve been hoping to advance conversations about geology and political economy (through dredging) and also to prompt a broader reckoning with what kinds of landscapes we are collectively building through environmental mitigation projects.


Michael Childers

Project: The Mountains are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park

Michael Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University (CSU). He is the author of the award-winning book Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement as well as several articles and book chapters on the history of public lands and tourism in the American West. A member of CSU’s Public and Environmental History Center Board, Childers coedits the University of Nebraska Press series Environment and Region in the American West with Dr. Leisl Carr Childers. He is currently writing his second book, The Mountains are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books and is cowriting the administrative history of the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service from 1960 to 2020.

cars in the parking lot at Yosemite National Park
Rondal Partridge, “Pave It and Paint It Green,” 1965

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

It was twofold. The first was my work as the project lead for the Yosemite National Park Administrative History as a grad student. I spent two summers in the park’s archives. During my free time I saw as much of Yosemite as I could, and came to wonder why we so often ignore the millions of visitors when we tell not only Yosemite’s history, but those of all national parks? That question built on my first book on the development of Colorado’s ski industry, and recreational tourism’s replacement of extractive industries throughout the American West. Whereas I focused on resort builders, the US Forest Service, and environmentalists, I wished to add the stories of those who visited such places. By placing them into a broader context, tell Yosemite’s history through their actions. Particularly, recreational tourism’s environmental costs.

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

The role Yosemite played in Republican efforts to secure California during the Civil War—particularly the confluence of wealthy abolitionist’s romantic views of nature’s ability to reform society. We often talk about the origins of the national parks as a mass movement. But it began with the actions of a few wealthy reformers to both preserve the Yosemite Valley for their enjoyment and preserve the Union.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

A few things, I suppose. One, further complicating conservation and our love of the national parks. What really is their purpose? Two, add more texture to how we think about the park’s history by moving beyond stories of park administrators and famous pioneers. And three, provoke more thoughtful conversations about the parks, what we want them to be, and how to best get there.


Julia A. King

Project: Land as Archive: An Indigenous Landscape History of the Rappahannock People of Tidewater Virginia

Julia A. King is the George B. and Willma Reeves Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she studies, teaches, and writes about historical archaeology and Chesapeake history and culture. She has held fellowships with Dumbarton Oaks, the Virginia Historical Society, and Winterthur Museum and received six major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2003 until 2011, King served as an Expert Member on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a Federal agency that advises the president and Congress on matters of national historic preservation policy. In 2018, the Society for Historical Archaeology presented King with the J.C. Harrington Award in recognition of her scholarly contributions to the discipline. She has also received awards from the Register for Professional Archaeologists and the Archaeological Society of Virginia. Her current research focus includes Indigenous history and colonialism in the Chesapeake region.

historic rural home
The c. 1880 Samuel Nelson House in Indian Neck, Virginia; Samuel Nelson was a Rappahannock man whose daughter, Susan, later ran an Indian school and an apothecary. The house was documented using measured drawings and archaeological survey. Together with oral history narratives, this evidence is articulating a history of the Rappahannock Tribe. Credit: Julia A. King

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

I can see the initial spark only in hindsight; the spark came out of a public history project with the National Park Service: to (in close consultation with the Rappahannock Tribe) identify and define the Rappahannock Indigenous Cultural Landscape. My big questions: what can an interdisciplinary study of the landscape reveal about the geographies, experiences, and histories of Indigenous Rappahannock communities living in this river valley from just before colonization to the present? How did Native people draw on shared memories and Indigenous knowledge to fashion new things and new practices; how were these new forms and practices enacted or performed in the landscape? How have these practices supported Rappahannock survival and shaped Rappahannock futures?

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

The deep and very different nature of Indigenous memory. I have written about American historical memory as manifested in the landscape, the uses to which this memory has been put, and its politics. I thought I understood how memory and landscape worked until I began working closely with tribes. For Indigenous people, landscape is the archive; it is chronologically deeper; it is full of signs unseen by non-Indigenous people; it is local; it is grounded in reciprocity. And, frankly, this description fails to really convey its difference.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

I work in the Chesapeake Tidewater, a place that regards itself as the “birthplace” of America. Many researchers have focused on the region’s Indigenous histories, generating valuable, impressive narratives / histories. What working with the tribes (not just the Rappahannock, but other tribes as well) has taught me is that these important Indigenous histories always start from a colonial place: histories of nations the colonists interacted with on a regular basis. Equally powerful nations who had little to no dealings with colonists are always overlooked: there may be little documentation, no archaeology, oral history is suspect, etc. I want to mix this up with help from my Rappahannock colleagues; to challenge current understandings of Indigenous history in the region. I hope I can do it.


Kim Haines-Eitzen

Project: Crossing the River of Fire: Apocalypse, Transformation, and the Elements in Late Antiquity

Kim Haines-Eitzen is the Hendrix Memorial Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. She received her PhD in ancient Mediterranean religions from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a scholar of early Christianity and early Judaism, she has written widely on ancient scribal practices, gender and sexuality, and, more recently, on the soundscapes of late ancient monasticism. She is the author of Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford, 2000), The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity (Oxford, 2011), Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton, 2022), and the forthcoming The Gospel of John: A Biography, which will appear in Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. Haines-Eitzen’s media presence includes writing for The Conversation and The Huffington Post and other outlets, numerous interviews for radio programs and podcasts, and leading workshops on topics related to her research.

images of fire burning and of new growth in forest
At left, a picture of the flow of burning, evoking remarks by Early Church Father John Chrysostom who discussed how the light from torches held by ancient Christians as they processed resembled fiery rivers. At right, a vivid depiction of regrowth after a forest fire. Both images by Haines-Eitzen.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

When I was finishing my last book, Sonorous Desert (2022), I returned to a story from late antiquity about an “aged nun” who describes a vision she had when she was younger, a vision that led her to choose the monastic life. Her description of the vision is dramatic and sensational, but what struck me most was the vivid auditory and tactile language around scenes of fire. This in turn led me to think more about the paradox of fire, both ancient and contemporary: fire as disturbance and destruction; fire as regenerative and renewing. I began looking more closely at early Christian and Jewish texts about fire, and I noticed how fire works alongside other ancient elements—air, water, and earth—especially in ancient apocalyptic texts. I’m asking how apocalypticism offers us insights into the environmental crisis of our own time.

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

We often think of apocalypse as the end times or a final cataclysm, but the root meaning of the Greek word is actually “revelation.” I’ve been surprised to see how ancient apocalyptic texts suggest a passage through the apocalypse, a portal to other possibilities, a crossing of the so-called river of fire. Destruction is not the only story told in apocalyptic (and mystical-apocalyptic) texts. If we begin to understand more about how apocalypse is closely woven with discovery and revelation, these texts can reveal how the four ancient elements were key to understanding both environmental destruction and regeneration. I find the vivid use of earth, air, water, and fire—and the kinetic interaction between these elements—a compelling way to reflect on our contemporary environmental crises.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

I hope my research will encourage us to rethink the apocalypse-as-destruction story. The confluence of the elements—the way they are intertwined with one another, constantly in motion, vivid and dynamic—also allows us to attend to kinesis, movement, the transformational fluidity of the elements. I have found it helpful to incorporate contemporary video art installations into my analysis of ancient apocalyptic texts. The work of video artist Bill Viola, in particular, offers a kind of visual and auditory vocabulary that changes the way we read ancient apocalyptic texts. Time and scale, texture and sound, light and darkness, and above all, motion and perspective—each of these features in video art can usefully reveal new ways of understanding apocalyptic thought.