Congratulations to Garrett Nelson (PhD ’16) who was named one of seven postdoctoral students to Dartmouth’s Society of Fellows, the second cohort of rising scholars to be selected since Dartmouth president Phil Hanlon laid out a vision for this society three years ago.
Nelson, who will attain his PhD in August, is a historical geographer whose work focuses on the history of landscape planning in the United States. His dissertation, “A Place Altogether: Planning and the Search for Unit Landscapes, 1816–1956,” takes a historical approach to the question of what size areas are appropriate to plan as a whole. By following debates among planners, scientists, social reformers, and politicians about how to evaluate unity and diversity in spatial terms, Nelson examines both the institutional and the moral consequences of calling some part of the Earth’s surface a “single” place. His work explores how the different kinds of “unit” geographies in which planners operate—from neighborhoods and towns to metropolises and eco-regions—bear the traces of socially-contested processes of inclusion and exclusion. More broadly, Nelson is interested the ways that groups come to organize themselves geographically, and how these patterns trace onto ideological arguments about justice, community, state power, and environmental regulation. His advisor is Bill Cronon.
Other fellows include Michael Barany, who receives his PhD in the history of science from Princeton University;Yesenia Barragan, who did her doctoral work in history at Columbia University; Nathalie Batraville, who receives a PhD in French from Yale University; Alexander Sotelo Eastman, who receives his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in Romance languages and literatures—Spanish; Tatiana Reinoza; who receives her PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin; and Yana Stainova, whose doctorate is in anthropology and is from Brown University.
This year’s fellows, selected from a pool of 736 applicants, begin three-year fellowships on Sept. 1. The fellows will participate in the activities of the society, including presenting their own work through society-sponsored symposiums and events. They will hold appointments as non-tenure-track lecturers in a department. They will teach one course during two academic years, and will be in residence for the fall, winter, and spring terms, and during one of two summer terms. Fellows will receive a stipend and will participate in pedagogical training through the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL).
