People

Conveners

Meet the dedicated scholars at Duke coordinating this event:

Panelists

Learn about the conference presenters and their areas of specialized research (listed below in order of presentation).

Matthew Shutzer

Matthew Shutzer is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Duke. His writing has recently appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and HistoryPast and PresentThe Radical History Review, and the Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, among other academic and public-facing outlets. His book on the history of India’s fossil economy, Earth on Fire: India and the Global Rise of Fossil Fuels, is forthcoming.

Huatse Gyal

Huatse Gyal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Gyal has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. He is also the co-editor of a volume, entitled, Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015). His research integrates the interdependent and intimate relationships between land, language, and community, with concerns about state environmentalism and climate change, and an interdisciplinary approach to land-based indigenous revitalization movements in a global context.

Jieun Cho

Jieun Cho is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral associate at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. Her book project, Nuclear Families: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-3.11 Japan, investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Shannon Cram 

Shannon Cram is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and author of Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility. She lives beside a small lake and a large forest in the Snoqualmie Valley.

Nicole Barnes

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is Associate Professor in the departments of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies here at Duke. Her first book, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945(University of California Press 2018), received the 2019 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2020 William H. Welch medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She is currently writing a social and ecological history of night soil and toilets in modern China.

Albert L. Park

Albert L. Park is the Bank of America Associate Professor of Pacific Basin Studies at Claremont McKenna College (The Claremont Colleges). He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea and is the co-editor of Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments. Dr. Park’s current research project focuses on the roots of environmentalism in modern Korea. He is the founder and co-editor of Environments of East Asia—a Cornell University Press, multidisciplinary, open-access book series that covers environmental issues and supported by The Henry Luce Foundation.

Moderators