Meet the NiCHE New Scholars Committee

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NiCHE is excited to share this year’s New Scholars Committee members. The New Scholars community serves as a network for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and recent graduates who are interested in environmental history and the environmental humanities to meet once a month to connect and collaborate on different aspects of environmental scholarship. The research interests of this year’s New Scholars range from digital environmental humanities, agricultural history, arts-based research methods, and environmental justice. Check our Twitter account (@NiCHE_NS) for updates on upcoming events and blog posts from New Scholars.

Heather Rogers

Heather Rogers (she/her) is a graduate student in McGill University’s Digital Humanities program in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal). She is interested in how digital humanities scholarship can intersect with environmental humanities and critical plant studies to tell more nuanced stories around human-plant entanglements. Her research is focused on botanical history, herbaria, and using digital storytelling tools to create space for women’s contributions to botanical knowledge. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, gardening, and spending time with her dog. You can find her on Twitter at @Heatherette13.

Caitlynn Beckett

I am currently a PhD candidate in Geography at Memorial University, where I also completed my MA in 2017. I am a settler scholar from Treaty 4 Territory and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan. I now live in Whitehorse, Yukon (on Ta’an Kwach’an and Kwanlin Dün territory) and work for the Ross River Dena Council on various mine remediation projects. My research interests include processes of socio-environmental reclamation, environmental justice and governance of resource extraction across Northern Canada. Twitter: @caitlynnbeckett

Laurence Butet-Roch

Photo Credit: Cole Breiland.

Laurence Butet-Roch (she/her) is a PhD student in Environmental Studies at York University. Building on a decade-long (photo)journalism career covering environmental justice and Indigenous rights issues, her research probes mainstream representation of industrial contamination through participatory visual discourse analysis and collaborative photographic approaches. You can find her work in the pages of Beside Magazine, Maisonneuve, PhotoEd, Point of View, Polka Magazine, and The British Journal of Photography, amongst others. She teaches Interactive Storytelling at the Toronto Metropolitan University and at the Université de l’Ontario Français. When she’s not thinking about media, new and old, you can find her climbing, tending to her house plant collection or contemplating the different cultural significance of snakes. 

Ihediwa Nkemjika Chimee

Ihediwa Nkemjika Chimee teaches history and international studies in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka Nigeria. His research interest covers political history, economic history, social and cultural history, environmental history, history of science and technology and colonial history. He has also researched in the areas of war and conflict, genocide and Holocaust studies. He has published in reputable journals within and outside Nigeria, and has appreciable book chapter contributions in many edited volumes. He has attended conferences across Europe, Israel, India and Africa.

Amrita DasGupta

Amrita DasGupta is a third-year doctoral candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her PhD deals with South Asian transnational borders and trafficking in humans, especially along the mangrove frontier. She completed her M.Phil titled ‘Bonbibi’s Sundarbans: Tiger Widows and Water-Prostitutes’ from Jadavpur University. It interrogated the impact of/relation between animal-attack widows and the changing norms of widowhood in relation to sex work in the Sundarbans–World’s Only Mangrove Tigerland. Her short documentary “Save the Sundarbans” was awarded the cinematography award, script and editing award, you can watch it here https://osun.studio

Jody Hodgins

Jody Hodgins is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at York University. Her research focuses on histories of the environment, science, animals, and technologies. At York, her dissertation examines animal health practices and the transition to professional veterinary medicine in rural nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ontario. Jody’s past research has looked at how the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps managed to combat disease throughout World War One, and the role that science and culture played in rural settler life. She is also an article editor for the Left History journal. 

Andrew Hoyt

Andrew Hoyt is a second-year MA student in history at Trent University. His research brings together environmental history, the history of science, and political history to examine the different forms of environmental knowledge that have shaped US environmental governance since the beginning of the twentieth century. His thesis focuses on the science and practice of ecological restoration in the American Midwest and its relation to the settler-colonial history of the region. He believes that research on historical shifts in the nature of environmental management has an important part to play in the ongoing creation of public policy, and he is committed to disseminating his work to a broad audience. You can find him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Adrianna Michell

Adrianna Michell (she/her) is a PhD student in the department of English at the University of Toronto. She previously completed her BA in English & Cultural studies and MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. Her research considers temporality in contemporary fiction via the intersecting fields of disability studies and ecocriticism. Her past research in the digital humanities and critical health humanities informs her current interests in literary and cultural representations of non-normative bodyminds and environments. Outside of her academic work, Adrianna contributes to ongoing work in anti-oppression and sexual violence prevention. 

Feature image: Ontario, Canada. Photo by Derek Sutton on Unsplash
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Heather Rogers

I am a recent graduate of the Digital Humanities program at McGill University. My research focused on digital environmental humanities (DEH), new materialism, critical plant studies, and botanical history.

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