Greta Marchesi Geography Postdoctoral Fellow

Greta Marchesi joined the Geography Department in fall of 2016 as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Greta's research focuses on the ways that expert knowledge about environmental resources is shaped by political relations between people. These include dynamics of race, class, and gender as well as national and international governance. She is particularly interested in the ways that ostensibly universal science is taken up and transformed in relation to place-based environmental claims. Her current book project, Grounding Power: Soil, Science, and Citizenship, 1929-1949, investigates the development of new soil conservation expertise during the period of the global Great Depression, after early 20^th century commodity bubbles had pushed soils around the world to produce at unsustainable rates for global markets. Grounding Power compares the national soil conservation programs that emerged in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States during this period, asking how Depression-era movements for land and labor reform in each national context also provoked new ways of imagining national soil resources. Her new research asks how indigenous land claims around the Americas have shaped the development of environmental science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This winter, Greta will teach a new Freshman Writing Seminar centered on the theme of Border Geographies (Geog 7). Students in this class will draw on personal experience, media and visual cultural analysis, and academic research to make sense of borders as a cultural, economic, and environmental contact zones. In the spring, she'll teach a new course on Indigeneity and Development (Geog 19) exploring different efforts, including efforts by native peoples, to transform indigenous community life in the context of ongoing colonial struggles.