Hannah Gould

English & Sustainable Food and Farming
School of Humanities & Fine Arts
Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Hannah’s research includes public-facing materials that educate visitors to Kinney Center’s 28 acre grounds about the ecological histories and modern crises that face some of the plants and trees that grow there. Hannah is the recent recipient of the Undergraduate Sustainability Research Award for her project Community Classroom of Hope and she is currently serving as the Undersecretary of Sustainability in the Student Government Association for UMass.

Melanie Morgan

Horticulture
Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Melanie engages in innovative hands-on research across the Center’s rare book library, kitchen garden, and apple orchard as she considers: “What models for sustainability do the past offer to our present moment of ecological crises?”

Fiona MacLaughlin

English & Natural Resource Conservation, Forestry
School of Humanities & Fine Arts
School of Earth & Sustainability

Expanding from her experience gardening at the Barnegat Light Memorial Garden, Fiona’s research links historical experiences of cultivation with our modern practices of sustainability.

Emma Zimmerman Greenlee

Forest Resources & Aboriculture
School of Environmental Conservation

Emma’s Graduate research is focused on the creation and stewardship of food forests, especially as they were maintained by indigenous groups pre-American colonization.

Jade Alicandro

Herbalist

Jade Alicandro weaves a love of bioregionally abundant herbs and kitchen medicine into her work as a community and clinical herbalist. Milk & Honey Herbs is a small, diversified, family-owned farm and business in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts. 

Madge Evers

Artist

Madge is an educator, gardener, and visual artist whose work celebrates decomposition and regeneration. Referencing photosynthesis and the ancient collaboration in mycorrhiza, her practice involves foraging for mushrooms and plants. Her Fall 2022 Artist in Residence exhibit was titled “Foraged: Kitchen Garden Herbaria”.

Brandon Graving

Artist

Brandon is a sculptor and printmaker who often works on a very large scale in mediums that include bronze, neon, paper, resins, steel, and wood. She is the owner and master printmaker at Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop which holds one of the largest platen presses in the world. Her Spring 2024 exhibit was titled, “Elusive Prize: Wonder, Wing, & Transmutation”.

SUZETTE MARIE MARTIN

Artist

Suzette is a figurative painter based in New England. She uses allusions to mythology and the narrative potential of body language, combined with data, symbols and text, to confront the existential trauma of ecological decline and intensifying climate crises. Her exhibit “Apocalypse: Science & Myth” was featured during her Spring 2023 residency.

Andrea Caluori

Maker/Artist

Andrea considers herself more a maker than an artist. She loves working with her hands to create objects. Her fine artwork includes printmaking, portrait paintings, and, more recently, brass jewelry making. Andrea was the inaugural Artist in Residence and her exhibit “Terroir: Memory & Myth” was on display Spring/Summer 2022.

The Futuring Lab

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–concerns about climate change, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things–this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable.

Matt Kaminsky

Orchardist

Matt is an orchardist, shepherd, wild apple forager, and cider maker. He is the author of The Wild Apple Forager’s Guide, Pomological Series: Wild Apple Exhibition Vol. 2, Proceedings from the First Annual Wild & Seedling Pomological Exhibition, and he co-manages Meadowfed Lamb.

Dan Bensonoff

Sustainability Coordinator
Campus Gardens

​As the coordinator of the UMass Permaculture Initiative, Dan works to ensure that the gardens provide an exemplary space for eco-conscious gardening and sustainable living. Aside from working in the gardens, Dan teaches a practicum on permaculture gardening, coordinates the UMass Student Farmers' Market, and provides learning experiences for various visiting groups.

Britt Crow-Miller

Senior Lecturer
Dept. of Environmental Conservation

Britt is faculty in the Departments of Environmental Conservation and Earth, Geographic and Climate Sciences at UMass. In addition to teaching and mentoring, Britt is Director of the Sustainability Science graduate program. Her academic research is focused on political ecology,  water politics, sustainability education, and global development.

Lena Fletcher

Senior Lecturer
Dept. of Environmental Conservation

Students enrolled in the Natural Resource Conservation course "Environment & Society" performed a BioBliz of the Center's woods to gain a better understanding of the land and its native species.

Sandy Litchfield

Associate Professor
Architecture

Sandy teaches courses at the intersection of art, architecture, design, and writing. Her studio practice focuses on contemporary representations of landscape.
 She is interested in landscape theory, speculative design, future studies, fiction, and environmental humanities. She is the founder and co-creator of On Distant Keys and is a contributor to the Anthropocene Lab. 

Marissa Nicosia

Associate Professor of English
Penn State Abington

Marissa teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. Her public food history website Cooking in the Archives features more than a hundred updated recipes.

Malcolm Sen

Associate Professor
English

Malcolm’s research interests focus on questions of justice, statecraft, and postcolonial politics as they emerge in this contemporary moment of climate crisis. At UMass Amherst he teaches courses on environmental humanities and postcolonial studies at the graduate level, and Irish literature, global Anglophone literature, and climate fiction at the undergraduate level. He is also a contributor to the Anthropocene Lab.

Haylie Swenson

Writer

Haylie Brooke is a writer and educator currently living in Washington, DC. She has a PhD in English with a focus on animal studies from The George Washington University. She’s currently working at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and revising her first novel.

Meg Vickery

Lecturer
History of Art & Architecture

Meg has written extensively on the architecture of women’s colleges. Her 2010 exhibition, “Greening the Valley: Sustainable Architecture in the Pioneer Valley” combined her interest in collegiate architecture and issues surrounding sustainability and publicized the varied efforts at sustainability in the region. She is also an organizer of the Sustainable EweMass project.

Robert Deconto

Professor
Director, School of Earth & Sustainability

Rob studies polar climate change, the response of ice sheets to a warming climate, and coastal impacts of sea-level rise. He serves on international science advisory boards and is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Previously, he held research positions at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He is a contributor to the Anthropocene Lab at UMass. 

Lisa DePiano

Lecturer
Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Lisa’s Permaculture and Design students collaborated with the Kinney Center to develop models for land management that draw from early modern practices and contemporary permaculture principles.

Kelly Klingler

Lecturer
Dept. of Environmental Conservation

Kelly and her students have installed a series of camera traps to learn how animals engage across the Center's varied landscapes. She is also an organizer of the Sustainable EweMass project.

Thaddeus Miller

Associate Professor
School of Public Policy

Thaddeus’ work focuses on interdisciplinary research collaborations and research-community partnerships to advance urban sustainability and resilience, from the local to the international level. He serves on the leadership team of a five-year, $12 million National Science Foundation-funded Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network project that engages with nine cities in the US and Latin America to advance research, policy, and practice on resilience in the face of climate change. He is also a contributor to the Anthropocene Lab.

ELSA PETIT

Senior Lecturer
Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Elsa’s research aims to better understand plant-microbe interactions to help make agriculture one of the solutions to climate change and increase biodiversity.  She contrasts cultivated crops and their wild relatives to quantify the impact of human management on microbial dynamics and study disease resistance variations. Elsa specializes in grape production at Cold Spring Orchard.

Regine Spector

Associate Professor
Political Science

Regine teaches comparative political economy, development, energy and Central Asian politics courses. Her current research examines New England energy politics and electric grid reform, and the climate implications of our energy and water use practices. She work in partnership with other colleagues and students at UMass, and with multiple New England organizations seeking to advance climate-friendly and justice-oriented energy systems. She is also a contributor to the Anthropocene Lab.

Scout Turkel

MFA candidate
Dept. of English

Scout holds a degree in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Born in California, Scout’s work can be found in Oversound, Tagvverk, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, and elsewhere. In Fall 2023, she is teaching “Writing on Earth”.