I am a historian of the 20^th century United States whose research focuses on gender and sexuality, the environment, and science and technology.  I am particularly interested in women’s participation in grassroots social movements and the ways activists linked environmental concerns to demands for gender and racial justice.

My current book project, Ecological Domesticity: Women’s Feminist, Technological Activism and the Politics of Planetary Care, traces women’s grassroots environmental activism from the 1960s to the 1980s in Canada and the United States.  I follow women from disarmament campaigns to alternative technology organizations to early ecofeminism and feminist science and technology activism.  These individuals linked technological and environmental activism to women’s liberation. They did so by revealing gendered radiation harms, by constructing homes to replicate ecological processes, and by insisting on the value of women’s care work. I argue that these activists developed what I call “ecological domesticity”: new conceptualizations of the connections between women’s domestic work, the materiality of homes, and a global ecosystem. For these activists, “ecological domesticity” centered a feminist politics that revealed how social and technological systems impacted women. Their focus on homes helped propel their work to national attention, from newspapers to government grants. However, I argue that within mainstream representations, these women’s technological, feminist vision dissipated. It was replaced with images that reified white, middle-class, heteronormative domestic practices as the correct way to care for a threatened earth.

My work has been published in Environmental History and Maine History as well as in public environmental history forums, such as NiCHE and Environmental History Now. I also hold an MS in Geography and have spent time as an organic farmer and community gardener in Wisconsin and throughout New England.