I’m a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. My research is based in southeast Louisiana’s piney woods, where I think about the confluence of water infrastructure and industrial aftermath, specifically as relates with 20th c. lumber in the U.S. Gulf South and its various historic and contemporary outgrowths (creosote, paper, engineered woods). My work is anchored primarily in Louisiana’s St. Tammany and Washington parishes, but I am also interested in the piney woods as a distinct ecological, political economic, and (in the case of Louisiana) geologic formation that bands across the broader Gulf South’s immediate interior, adjacent to the coast. As floodwaters wick into this region, they are guided by infrastructures (and ruts and gullies) both accreted and emergent; I try to attend to some of these.

I grew up in Slidell, Louisiana, on Bayou Paquet, and in New Orleans. Prior to Berkeley, I received a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University and a Master of Public Health from Columbia University in Sociomedical Sciences. My research has received support and funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Ethnological Society, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the UC Mentored Research Award, the UC Dissertation-Year Award, and the Brandes Award.

Contact: nmabry@berkeley.edu