My research interests include environmental perception, landscape change, boosterism and development, migration and settlement patterns, ethnic enclaves, cities, agriculture, popular culture, World War I-era propaganda and vigilantism in the Great Lakes states. My book The Future City on the Inland Sea: A History of Imaginative Geographies of Lake Superior (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007) is a historical geography of the south shore of Lake Superior and the Chequamegon Bay-Apostle Islands area. The manuscript won the Great Lakes American Studies/Ohio University Press book award, and the book was recently awarded the J. B. Jackson Prize by the Association of American Geographers. (It is currently available from OUP for 20% off the list price.)
As an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I am reworking my first draft of history of the College of Letters & Science and liberal education, 1874-1989, while also actively seeking a position elsewhere as a geographer or environmental historian.
Recently, I began work on a long simmering project that draws on documents my father collected while working with Dr. Gordon Seagrave in Namkham, Burma from 1961-1963. In addition to offering a perspective on the coup d'etat and the immediate aftermath, the book will also examine the United States side of the story, including the work of the American Medical Society for Burma. When the Burma book is completed, I plan to return my attention to the upper Great Lakes region.
