Michelle Berry, PhD
2024 Early Career Scholar Award
"The Early Career Scholar Award means a great deal to me because it is recognition of work that I take great joy in doing. It is especially gratifying that my love of teaching and my devotion to my classes and students as well as my research is being celebrated. My receipt of the award also suggests that there is space at the University of Arizona for non-traditional pathways into the academy." |
Dr. Berry is an historian whose primary intellectual interests include feminist pedagogy (teaching), ecofeminism, political ecology, environmental and labor history, and sports studies. In each of these, she is interested in understanding how power is constructed around gendered, racialized, and classed identities. She defines herself, professionally, as a teacher-scholar who encourages students to engage in comparative study especially with regard to the connection between the cultural and the political.
After nearly 20 years in the classroom, she has become convinced that empowering students to know how to read and write critically and think analytically is the greatest success she can have in the classroom. One can find a longer treatise on her approach to teaching in her newly published book on the subject A Primer for Teaching Environmental History (Duke University Press, 2018). In addition to teaching and writing about teaching, she is also at work on a monograph that examines the collective environmental identities of range cattle ranchers in the US West from 1945-1965. She is interested in the ways in which this group of agricultural laborers used ecological knowledge and connection with the nonhuman world to erase internal differences and division in their quest to remain one of the most powerful special interest groups in the United States.
Award announcement from the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences