An article in University of Wisconsin News gives a nice overview of my work and background.

My initial training was as an ecologist rather than a historian. While on a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington, I researched the evolutionary ecology of Carmine bee-eaters nesting along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. My experiences in African conservation persuaded me that to understand (and reverse) environmental degradation, we needed to pay much closer attention to human communities. Understanding the historic roots of environmental change became my primary research focus.