Fellowship Program Scholar-Advisors

Black Earth Institute

Connecting earth, spirit and society through the arts

Cristina Eisenberg's home is on Red Owl Mountain, part of the Swan Range in northwestern Montana. Grizzly bears and wolves outnumber humans in the area, which makes it perfect for study of tropic cascades (the connection between predators and biodiversity) and wolf ecology, Cristina's areas of interest. She is also a scholar of the works of Aldo Leopold and is completing a book for Island Press entitled Landscapes of Hope: Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity.

Kathleen Jenks taught mythological studies at Pacifica University in California; she now advises graduate students at the Graduate Theological Foundation in South Bend, Indiana (affliated with Oxford University in England). Kathleen maintains a website devoted to mythology (http://www.mythinglinks.org/) and has recently done work in mythological computer gaming.

Kerry Trask, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Manitowac, is the author of Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America. Booklist said that "Trask's fine synthesis of historical frontier context and immediate events judiciously partakes of pathos and erudition," while the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Blending history with ethnography and a bit of sociology, Trask's volume explains the war and its lingering impact extremely well . . . Fascinating."

Mary Jo Neitz is professor of sociology at the University of Missouri and an authority on the sociology of religion, especially studying the role of women in charismatic Catholicism and neopaganism; she recently served as chair of the section on religion of the American Sociological Association. Her areas of specialization are gender, culture and qualitative methods. She is president of the Society for the Study of the Sociology of Religion.

Ron Engel is Professor Emeritus at Meadville Lombard and Senior Research Consultant, The Center for Humans and Nature. Ron helped pioneer the new academic fields of environmental ethics, history, and theology/philosophy. Through his work with the Eco-justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches, and as co-director of the Program on Ecology, Justice, and Faith in the Chicago Association of Theological Schools, he contributed to the movement for eco-justice within the ecumenical religious community. Ron is currently co-chair of the Ethics Specialist Group of the Commission on Environmental Law for the World Conservation Union. He is the author of Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes, which won several book awards, including the Meltzer National Book Award.

Joan Gibb Engel holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Chicago. A free-lance writer and editor, she works in the fields of environment, culture, and natural history with emphasis on their interconnections. Her published work includes non-fiction, fiction, and poetry in Chicago Wilderness Magazine, Orion, and Terra Nova.