Fellowship Program: Scholar-Advisors

Black Earth Institute

Connecting earth, spirit and society through the arts

Cristina Eisenberg is a Ph.D. Candidate in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, and a Boone and Crockett Fellow. As a participant in the SW Alberta Elk Study, she is taking a close look at how the presence of a keystone predator, the gray wolf, affects everything in an ecosystem. Her first book, Landscapes of Hope: Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity, will be published in spring 2010 by Island Press. She teaches courses on Aldo Leopold and Ecosystem Management, and Large Carnivores and Public Policy.

Kathleen Jenks has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her on-going research focuses on the origins and aesthetics of sacred theatre in ancient and medieval India; Egyptian and Greek goddess, animal, and tree mythologies; European Grail motifs; and Navajo philosophy, aesthetics, and sacred narrative. For nine years she taught in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Now retired and relocated in her home state of Michigan, she works as a writer, a consultant in myth, religion, and psychology, and webmistress of Myth*ing Links, her award winning site devoted to mythology, lore, ritual, sacred arts, and environmental issues (www.mythinglinks.org/). Her published works include an historical novel set in ancient Egypt, The River and the Stone (Dutton 1977); the non-fiction Journey of a Dream Animal (Julian Press, 1975); and various academic papers and essays found in Psychological Perspectives; Journal of Regression Therapy; Musicworks Society of Ontario; and Encyclopedia of Gods.

Kerry Trask is professor emeritus of history with the University of Wisconsin Colleges. A native of Canada (and a high school classmate and teammate of Gordon Lightfoot’s), he has particular interest in the early history and development of the Great Lakes. He has participated and presented at numerous National Endowment for the Humanities seminars and institutes, was awarded a research fellowship by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and is review editor for Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review. Trask is the author of three books: In the Pursuit of Shadows: Massachusetts, Millennialism, and the Seven Years War; Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin, winner of the Wisconsin Writers Council Nonfiction Book Award; and Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, which was awarded the 2006 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award by the State Historical Society of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin Colleges’ Barrington-Musolf Faculty Research Award.  Trask was made a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in 2008. He lives in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, not far from Lake Michigan, where he is currently working on a new book.

Mary Jo Neitz, professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri, recently served as President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and has chaired the section on the Sociology of Religion within the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Charisma and Community: A Study of Religious Commitment with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal; Culture: Sociological Perspectives (with John Hall); and Sociology on Culture (with John Hall and Marshall Battani).  She edited Feminist Narratives and the Sociology of Religion (with Nancy Nason-Clark) and Sex, Lies and Sanctity: Religion and Deviance in Contemporary North America (with Marion S. Goldman). A practicing ethnographer, she also teaches and writes about feminist research methodologies.  She grew up in Montana and maintains a love of the high plains and the Rocky Mountains.  She now lives and gardens in Boone County, Missouri with her two cats, Isis and Osiris.  She is currently working on a book, Encounters in the Heartland: Congregational Stories in a Post-rural Landscape. Funded by a grant from Eli Lilly, this study of churches in six communities, looks at the congregations as places where continuing viability depends on change in the very institutions which are often the bastions of tradition. 

Liam Heneghan is an ecosystem ecologist working at DePaul University where he is a Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture.  His research has included studies on the impact of acid rain on soil foodwebs in Europe, and on inter-biome comparisons of decomposition and nutrient dynamics in forested ecosystems in North American and in the tropics. Over the past decade Heneghan and his students have been working on restoration issues in Midwestern ecosystems. Heneghan is co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness Science Team.  He is also a graduate student in philosopher, a part-time model, and an occasional poet.