Michelle K Berry

Biography

Michelle Berry is an historian (PhD, University of Arizona, 2005) whose primary intellectual interests include feminist pedagogy (teaching), ecofeminism, political ecology, environmental and labor history, and sports studies. In each of these, she is interested in understanding how power is constructed around gendered, racialized, and classed identities.  She defines herself, professionally, as a teacher-scholar who encourages students to engage in comparative study especially with regard to the connection between the cultural and the political.  She teaches a wide variety of courses in the Gender and Women's Studies and the History departments, and in each students will recognize common objectives - namely that she expects her students to leave the class having had an opportunity to absorb and practice a set of skills that she finds to be important in understanding and maneuvering power relationships, justice, and governance in their own lives in the 21st century.  These are the kinds of things she finds herself pondering around a campfire when she is away from her computer rejuvenating.  After nearly 20 years in the classroom, she has become convinced that empowering students to know how to read and write critically and think analytically is the greatest success she can have in the classroom.  One can find a longer treatise on her approach to teaching in her newly published book on the subject A Primer for Teaching Environmental History (Duke University Press, 2018).  In addition to teaching and writing about teaching, she is also at work on a monograph that examines the collective environmental identities of range cattle ranchers in the US West from 1945-1965.  She is interested in the ways in which this group of agricultural laborers used ecological knowledge and connection with the nonhuman world to erase internal differences and division in their quest to remain one of the most powerful special interest groups in the United States.  Michelle attended The Colorado College for undergraduate school, played four years of collegiate basketball, and coaches high school hoops in her spare time.

Degrees

• Ph.D. History
• University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States
• "Cow Talk: Culture and Identity In the Intermountain West Cattle Industry, 1945–1965"

Awards

• Publication Grant
• Charles Redd Center Brigham Young University, Fall 2022
• Fellow
• University of Arizona Experiential Learning Design Accelerator, Fall 2021
• SBS Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence
• Nominated by Gender and Women's Studies, Spring 2019 (Award Nominee)