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 how climate migration into and out of the northshore, in tandem with so-called structural and non-structural interventions into local landscapes and atmospheres, relate with the specific racialized, class, and environmental histories of those parishes (St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Livingston). In this, 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, sociospatial production of whiteness, gender, feminist and queer theory, southeastern pine histories, critical marshland histories