Meet the NiCHE New Scholars Committee

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NiCHE is excited to announce this year’s New Scholars committee! The committee is comprised of eight members who represent a wide range of environmental history and environmental humanities interests. The committee has a number of exciting plans for the New Scholars community that will be announced in the upcoming weeks and months.

Annabel Cowan

a color photo of a woman standing in front of a mountain. She is wearing a colorful jacket and a grey hat. She is smiling.

Annabel Cowan is a proud Canadian who comes from a long line of St. Lawrence ‘River Rats’. A sixth-generation member of the St. Lawrence River community, she has been on the water since she was a month old and has been hooked on river life ever since. She completed her B.A in Environment and Health at McGill University in Montreal where she explored the intersections of environmental sustainability, public health, and social equity. Currently completing a Master’s in Environment and Society at the Rachel Carson Centre in Munich, Annabel is a passionate environmentalist with a background in non-profit work and climate communication. She works to promote water health and highlight the importance of our water bodies for the many human and non-human communities that rely on them. Her goal is to ensure that another six generations may continue to live, work, and play along the river as she has.

Christina Frendo

A woman with long brown hair is smiling in front of a river. She is wearing a yellow sweater. There is a city skyline visible in the background.

Christina Frendo is a 2nd year PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Canada, and is currently a visiting researcher at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. She has an MA in Geography where her thesis focused on the tensions between urban agriculture and green gentrification in Montréal, and a BSc in Environmental Science where her honours thesis examined legacy mining contamination in Northern Ontario.  Her PhD work explores the implications of international climate finance instruments used in just energy transitions, with a focus on Colombia and Indonesia. Follow her on Instagram at @xinafrendo and on Linkedin at www.linkedin.com/in/christinafrendo .

Dani Mexner

A woman wearing sunglasses is standing on a pier. There are many boats behind her. She is dressed in black with bright pink shoes.

Dani Mexner is a doctoral student in Global Development Studies at Queen’s University researching mutual aid and experiences of healthcare amongst queer and trans folks in Northern Canada. Through arts-based methodologies, their work explores queer ethics of care in the context of a formal healthcare system that does not meet the needs of 2SLGBTQ+ communities. 

Debasree Sarkar

A woman with dark hair stands in front of a white curtain. She is wearing a blue sweater and the light is shining.

Debasree Sarkar, having completed her MA in History from Presidency University and M.Phil. in Women’s Studies from the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, is presently pursuing Ph.D. from the Department of History, Diamond Harbour Women’s University (Sarisha, West Bengal, India). The theme of her research has been reading the social history of Bengal through women’s autobiographical writings, with special emphasis on their sartorial changes. Apart from being involved in various academic projects, she has published in reputed newspapers and journals and contributed book chapters dealing with fashion, gender-based violence, representational politics, displacement, and environment. She has presented in international platforms such as the Dress and Body Association and the NortheastPopular Culture Association.  Recently, she collaborated on a project on “The Past as Present: Approaches to Pedagogy in History and Archaeology” organised by the Shiv Nadar University, where she worked with schoolchildren to assist them in comprehending history through textiles and clothes as part of questioning forms of everyday practices that cultivate cultural understanding. She was awarded the Papia Ghosh Memorial Prize at the 83rd session of the Indian History Congress in 2024 for her paper on “Sati and Its Afterlife: Social Desire and Public Discourse.” 

Nikolas Lamarre

A man wearing sunglasses and red baseball cap is smiling in front of an ocean. There is an ostrich in the background.

Nikolas Lamarre is a graduate student in Educational Technology and Design at the University of Saskatchewan. His research aims to leverage Extended Reality (XR) technologies to transform Natural History collections into interactive displays that support environmental learning and foster ecological awareness among young adults, while harnessing their storytelling potential to unearth compelling narratives that create stronger connections to nature beyond the virtual space. He also holds an MSc in Book History and Material Culture from the University of Edinburgh, where he explored the use of plants in book production. Outside academia, you can usually find him out exploring with my wee Scottie dog. As his research continues to develop, he plans to share parts of the journey on Instagram at @NaturalistXR. You can also find his academic work through his ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1891-2837

Hope Latta

A dark-haired woman is smiling on a bridge. There is a railing and the dome of a church in the background. She is wearing a red sweatshirt with "Acadia University" on it.

Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Hope completed her MA at the University of Toronto in Fall 2025, and previously earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University. From 2022-2023, Hope was a writing program recipient at Warner Bros. Discovery and developed two projects there. Her work draws on experience spanning public-sector security and media, both with an interest in speech and sound. Over the years, Hope has sustained an interest in how people come together – thoughtfully, safely, and with room for joy. Hope works with organizations internationally to support the development of safer, healthier communities, and is currently a committee member with the United Nations Association of Greater Boston (International Women’s Day). In 2022, she joined the Television Academy (Emmy Awards) as an Academic member, with a research interest in acoustic physics. Hope’s writing has appeared in: Harvard Gazette, Harvard Law Today, United Nations Association of Greater Boston, Interfaces: Essays & Reviews in Computing and Culture (University of Minnesota), and the Department of National Defence Scientific Research Journal. She was also a Staff Editor at the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (Vol 47). 

Sabrina Schettino

A woman wearing a poncho and hat is wading in the water. There are misty mountains behind her. The scene is grey and foggy.

Sabrina Schettino is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Eastern Piedmont, in Italy. Her research about Nuu-chah-nulth in the pelagic sealing industry in the nineteenth century focuses on environmental history, Indigenous history, and colonial labour regime. She has been visiting research student at the University of Victoria on a MITACa funded research term during which has conducted archival research and field research at the invitation of Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. 

Sayantika Chakraborty

A dark-haired woman wearing bright red lipstick is smiling indoors. There is a plant and a television behind her.

Sayantika Chakraborty is a final year PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Florida. She is also a community liaison member at HerRights, a not-for-profit based in Arizona, United States, that works towards women empowerment and promoting gender justice in the US and India. Sayantika’s PhD dissertation is on anthropogenic climate change induced migration stories, focusing on Indigenous and minority women from India, traversing multiple mediums such as literary, archival, historical and oral. Sayantika is also a public scholar of environmental humanities and attempts to bridge the gap between academic and public knowledge by doing frequent campus-community collaborations and public events. She has won numerous scholarships and awards for her research, such as the MLA/Modern Language Association’s Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship, Public Humanities Incubator Award; Tedder doctoral research funds and Kirkland Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Florida and the prestigious DAAD (German federal funds) short-term research grant for a visiting fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her academic writings have appeared and are forthcoming in the South Asian Review and The Routledge Handbook of the Blue Humanities, and she is currently working on a public facing project, an invited blogpost for the DGSKA (The German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology) on her field work (oral history interviews with Indigenous and Dalit women) in India’s Sundarbans.

cover image: Frozen river photo by Bryan Rodriguez on Unsplash

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Amrita DasGupta

Amrita DasGupta is a PhD scholar at the Department of Gender Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London) and a guest teacher at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the evolution and history of port brothels in the Indian Ocean deltas. She has been a fully funded visiting student research collaborator at Princeton University, a visiting scholar at the King’s India Institute (King’s College London), a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, LMU. Her decade-long research on the Sundarbans was recognised at the launch of the “Mangrove Project” at the House of Lords, Parliament of the United Kingdom. Some of her recent publication are “Puppets at the Hands of Water” published in the Springs Journal (2025), “Accommodative Apparatus: Drawing the Life of Sex Work on the Eroding Coasts of Sundarbans” in the Environment and History Journal (2024).

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