Nicole Mabry is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley where she researches the practical and felt work of sheltering worlds through climatic collapse. Her dissertation research is based in southeast Louisiana, on Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore. She considers flood mitigation efforts currently underway and the histories of earthworks projects in and around the coastal parishes broadly. Her research also examines the historic production and application of wood preservative-pesticide creosote, as well as its persistence in waterways throughout the southeastern U.S.
Nicole grew up in Slidell, Louisiana, on Bayou Paquet. Prior to Berkeley, Nicole received her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University and her Master of Public Health from Columbia University. Nicole has received support and funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Ethnological Society, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the UC Berkeley Mentored Research Award, and the Brandes Award.
Research interests: embodiment and feeling, property, suburbanization, southeastern pine histories, critical marshland histories, sediment