Nicole Mabry is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley where she researches the practical work of sheltering coastal and riverine worlds. Her dissertation research is based in southeast Louisiana’s piney woods, in the so-called Florida Parishes. She considers flood management and marshland restoration efforts currently underway there, as well as the histories of such earthworks projects, 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, and in New Orleans. Prior to Berkeley, Nicole received her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University and her Master of Public Health in Sociomedical Sciences 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 Mentored Research Award, and the UC Dissertation-Year Award.
Research interests: property, infrastructure, marshlands, U.S. Gulf South