New Member Profile: Shari Wilcox

Shari Wilcox is currently the Associate Director of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; a role that she has held for the past two years. Shari previously held lecturer roles at the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Texas-San Antonio. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she works at the intersections of animal geography, the environmental humanities, and conservation social science. Wilcox’s work has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the co-editor of Historical Animal Geographies (Routledge, 2018), and her first monograph will be published as part of the University of North Carolina’s Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges series in 2020.

After being on the UW-Madison campus for the past two years, Shari became intrigued by the Holtz Center. “I became interested in the Holtz Center as I learned more about the innovative research being conducted by the Center’s members.”, states Wilcox.  Shari is currently in the early stages of a new project that considers the confluences of wildlife conservation and technology. Focusing on large carnivores in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, her project is concerned in the ways in which new technologies are providing greater “access” (real and imagined) into the lives of cryptic species. Wilcox says, “I am particularly interested in the ways in which technological shifts in the past 5-10 years have changed the ways in which data is both collected and communicated to the public, and the ways this may be shaping and reshaping perceptions of ecological, social, and political risk in these contested spaces.”. Because of this, Shari is quite excited about becoming a member of the STS community.  She looks forward to “delving into new literatures and ways of thinking about the intersections of technology and environment” within the Center.

 

 

 

 

 

Shari Wilcox
Associate Director, Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
@ocelotltx on Twitter