ASEH Graduate Student Liaison

Some graduate professionalization updates: 

-The American Society for Environmental Historians is meeting in Madison, Wisconsin from March 28-31 and I intend to be there! I'm applying for the graduate liaison position, which would make me the leader of the ASEH's graduate caucus (new as of 2011) and the representative of the society's graduate student community, which is somewhere around 80-90 people. I'm really pumped about this opportunity and will start drafting ideas about how to expand and retain membership and serve its members. I talked to Will Knight, the current liaison, this morning via Skype and I learned a lot about the group. They seem to have strong participation and involvement, so it's going to be important to keep the momentum going! I find out in December about the position, but either way I will be a member of the caucus just to be more involved and help build community. 

-I am working on finding funding to do research in Chicago for a couple of months this summer. I think I need to be at the Chicago Botanic Garden Archives, the Newberry Library and the Chicago History Museum, to examine the Garden's history and background, but I will also be looking for other archives and libraries in the area that might reveal the urban culture of the city in the post-war period. The history department has funding for the travel for this type of trip (Murray Miller Scholarship), but Dr. Brosnan also has an application for grant money for a research assistantship at the Newberry in the works. Fingers crossed!

-Finally, Dr. Cathleen Cahill from the University of New Mexico came to UH to give a talk on her new book, but she also came to our environmental reading group to talk about her project on Highway 101. It was really interesting to see the very beginning stages of a new book project and somewhat relieving to see that it is not all that different than what I am going through with my dissertation proposal. A major difference seems to be that she has more resources accessible to her in the form of colleagues she can reach out to and the simple knowledge of where to find sources from her past research experiences. I guess it just goes to show the benefits of networking and reaching out to your academic community.