Introducing the 2021 Environmental Fellows

April 21, 2021
Introducing the 2021 Environmental Fellows

HUCE announces new cohort of postdoctoral researchers

The Harvard University Center for the Environment announces the 2021 class of Environmental Fellows: Hélène Benveniste, Devin Judge-Lord, Joanna Linzer, and Kimia Shahi. These fellows will join a group of remarkable scholars who will be beginning the second year of their fellowships. Together, the Environmental Fellows at Harvard will form a community of researchers with diverse backgrounds united by intellectual curiosity, top-quality scholarship, and a drive to understand some of the most important environmental challenges facing society.

 

HÉLÈNE  BENVENISTE

Department/School: HKS; Earth & Planetary Sciences
Faculty Hosts: Joseph Aldy; Peter Huybers
PhD: Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, Princeton University

Hélène Benveniste uses interdisciplinary approaches to answer research questions directly relevant to climate change policy. 

Hélène received her PhD in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and earned an MS in Science and Executive Engineering from Mines Paristech. Her research focuses on two broad topics: human migration and inequality in the context of climate change, and global governance of environmental issues. In her work, she uses both quantitative methods drawn from environmental studies, economics, and demography, and qualitative methods grounded in political science.

As an Environmental Fellow, Hélène will continue to explore topics of mobility in the context of climate change, with the aim to map most relevant policy responses to climate-related migration. She will pursue this work with Professor Joseph Aldy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and with Professor Peter Huybers at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

 

DEVIN JUDGE-LORD

Department: Government
Faculty Host: Dan Carpenter
PhD: Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Devin Judge-Lord is a political scientist working at the intersection of social movements and technocratic policymaking.

Devin's research addresses bureaucratic policymaking, congressional oversight and representation, and environmental policy. His dissertation focuses on how public pressure campaigns affect agency rulemaking, a technocratic policy process where "public participation" is usually limited to sophisticated lobbying but occasionally includes millions of people mobilized by public pressure campaigns. It examines who participates in public pressure campaigns and why, whether these campaigns affect congressional oversight, and whether they affect policy. His work employs a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, with contributions mainly in the field of text analysis. Additionally, Devin has major collaborative projects on congressional behavior, interest-group lobbying, and private environmental governance. His work has been published in Organization & the Environment and Interest Groups & Advocacy. Prior to his academic career, Devin worked in local government and for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Devin holds a B.A. in Political Science from Reed College and a Master's in Environmental Science from Yale University. He will receive his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2021.

As an Environmental Fellow, Devin will work with Professor Dan Carpenter in the Department of Government to study how interest groups and legal ideas shape environmental policy. This research will leverage data and methods developed in Devin's dissertation to identify the participants and the stakes in agency rulemaking (both for people and ideas) and measure the relative influence of competing coalitions and ideas.

 

JOANNA LINZER

Department: History
Faculty Hosts: Ian Miller; Andrew Gordon
PhD: Japanese History, Yale University

Joanna Linzer is a historian of Japan researching the environmental and social consequences of developments in industry and agriculture.

Joanna earned a BA in History at Yale University and an AM from Harvard’s Regional Studies—East Asia program. Her dissertation research has focused on the environmental consequences of ironmaking in Japan during the early modern period (1603-1868) and into the twentieth century. Through exploring the development of the iron industry and the communities that supported it, her research engages questions of the environmental politics of premodern societies and the history of sustainability.

As an Environmental Fellow, she will work with Professors Ian Miller and Andrew Gordon as she develops a book manuscript based on her dissertation. She will also explore two new projects related to the environmental history of Japan in the context of the increasingly interconnected early modern world. The first examines Japan’s distinctive relationship to the Columbian Exchange. The second investigates the critical place of Japan in the global silver economy that forged transoceanic connections during this period.

 

KIMIA SHAHI

Department: History of Art & Architecture
Faculty Host: Robin Kelsey
PhD: Art History, Princeton University

Kimia Shahi is an art historian whose research explores intersections of visual culture and knowledge-production in relation to geography, empire, and environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Kimia received her AB in Art History, with a minor in Studio Art, from Dartmouth College, an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and will earn her PhD in Art History from Princeton University in 2021. Her dissertation examines the challenges of picturing coastal terrains across interconnected artistic and scientific spheres in the United States in the mid-through-late nineteenth-century, a period of imperial and colonial expansion, technological modernization, and proliferating modes of transoceanic exchange. Kimia has published her research in American Art and ART PAPERS and was a contributor to Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, the first major museum exhibition to examine American art from an eco-critical perspective.

As an Environmental Fellow, Kimia will work under the guidance of Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, developing a new study of Documerica, a project overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s, whose aim was to photographically document the breadth, scale, and impacts of environmental change across the greater United States.