2010-2011 National Fellowship Recipients

University of California, Berkeley
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Ms. Minkoff-Zern earned her B.A. degree at Cornell University. Laura-Anne has studied in Panama and Guatemala. Her research project has a working title of “Migrations of Hunger and Knowledge: Food Insecurity and California’s Indigenous Farm Workers”. Laura-Anne says about her research in California: the poorest populations consist largely of farm workers and the food insecure are those laboring to produce fresh food being shipped elsewhere. My research will study origins, patterns, and distribution of food insecurity among Mexican farm workers. Laura-Anne is the student of SWG’s first Pruitt Dissertation Fellow, Carolyn Finney, who holds a faculty position at Berkeley.

University of California, Los Angeles
Sarah H. Fernandez – Dept. of  Geography
She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees at UCLA also. Sarah’s research focuses on Esmeraldas in Northwest Ecuador and is designed to help identify a wildlife corridor to connect two ecological reserves. She will also use ethnographic methods to gain information on human-environment relationships of African Ecuadorians. She is particularly interested in knowing how local communities help to sustain ecosystems. She will investigate traditional land uses by Afro-Ecuadorian communities with particular attention to food system, agricultural fields, dooryard gardens, and wild sources of extractive goods.

Pennsylvania State University
Chelsea Teale – Dept of Geography
She earned her M.A. degree from Syracuse University and her B.A. from SUNY at Geneseo. Chelsea will be doing field-based and archival research on Dutch agricultural use and perceptions of historical wetland landscapes in New Netherland (New York). She will reconstruct the extent and use of agricultural wetlands using a variety of information sources. These include images, maps, herbarium records and newly-translated texts. Sediment samples from historic wetlands will be used to analyze plant macrofossils, phytoliths, charcoal and organic material. This research will provide insights into the transfer of Dutch wetland modification techniques to North America, Dutch colonial agriculture, and Dutch assimilation into English culture after 1664.