My interdisciplinary work in mountain studies explores how mountains are shaped not only by natural processes but by history, memory, and representation. Through studying sense of place, visual culture, and material remains, I investigate how people create meaning from mountain landscapes and how those meanings endure, change, or are contested over time.
My first scholarly monograph explores how people have forged connections to Mount Holyoke, a mountain in Western Massachusetts. I demonstrate the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and material culture, revealing how cultural perspectives, community activism, collective memory, and personal experiences shape understandings of a place.
This article examines how the material remains of a 1944 military plane crash on Mount Holyoke continue to shape the present. Through intertwining archaeological and ethnographic methodologies, I explore how the crash site, memorialization efforts, and museum interpretation contribute to memory, place-making, and public engagement with the past.
The way we view the landscape is socially constructed and influenced by media. I investigate how a collective vision of American mountains has been constructed through visual culture over the past two centuries. I argue that these ways of seeing are deeply intertwined with colonizing, nationalizing, and exclusionary processes.
Above the Oxbow: History and Memory on Mount Holyoke
Above the Oxbow: Engaging the Past at the Mount Holyoke Summit House
Above the Oxbow: Place Attachment on Mount Holyoke
Above the Oxbow: Sense of History at the Mount Holyoke Summit House
Place-Making on Mountaintops and Orogenic Ethnography on Mount Holyoke
The View from Mount Holyoke: A Persistent Vision of an Arcadian Landscape
WWII in Western Massachusetts: Contemporary Archaeology of a Plane Crash
The Power of Collective Vision: Landscape, Visual Media, and the Production of American Mountains