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, tentatively titled Making Home, Making Earth: Women’s Environmental Activism and the Politics of Planetary Care in late 20^th c. North America, looks at women’s involvement in grassroots activism from the 1960s to the 1980s in North America (Canada and the United States) and the ways they reimagined connections between bodies, homes, and a global ecosystem. I follow women from their work in disarmament campaigns to alternative technology organizations to early ecofeminism and feminist science and technology activism. These women expanded their political power through technoscientific critique, gained professional skills, entered international development work, and continued into other forms of feminism and environmental activism. In short, they linked technological and environmental activism to women’s liberation.

At the same time, this project looks at what I call ecological domesticity, or the reimagining of homes as ecological spaces. Activists supported the construction of ecological domesticity and their focus on homes, and actions within them, helped propel these activists’ work into the mainstream. However, I argue that this cultural shift rested specifically on reifying white, middle-class, heteronormative domestic practices as the correct way to care for a threatened earth.

My work has been published in Environmental History as well as in public environmental history forums, such as 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.