Current & Past Scholars

Photo of three people seated in a communal gathering space on Eden Hall Campus, inside a building with a large skylight and tall plant wall

Rachel Carson Visiting Scholars are experts in six areas central to the mission of Falk College of Environment, Leadership & Management:

  1. natural systems, including environmental science and natural resource conservation

  2. sustainable built systems, including green buildings and renewable energy

  3. equitable community development

  4. sustainable business practices

  5. food studies

  6. environmentally-inspired writing and communication

Rachel Carson Visiting Scholars take an intersectional approach to exploring the root causes of social and ecological crises; they broaden our understanding of possibilities and pathways towards a regenerative, climate-positive future.

Rachel Carson Scholars are leaders in their fields – whether they come from academia, business, government, or community organizations.

And they are proudly hosted at Chatham University as it stewards the legacy of its powerful alumna and advances a vision of equitable progress within a vital, living Earth.

Exchanging Ideas

Hear from Zygmunt J. B. Plater, inaugural Rachel Carson Visiting Scholar, and Lou Leonard, dean of the Falk College of Environment, Leadership, & Management and Eden Hall Farm, on what makes the program remarkable.

Current Scholar: Kai Bosworth

Kai Bosworth is a human geographer and is an associate professor of international studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

He is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His current book project is titled Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-oil Activism.

Past Scholars

  • Peter Friederici

    Director of Rural Foods Pathways Project at Northern Arizona University

  • Taylor Brorby

    author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience

  • Hanna Garth

    Hanna Garth

    Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University

  • Heather Valentino

    Heather Valentino

    Assistant Director of Energy Management at Case Western Reserve University

  • Joseph Sarkis

    Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s (WPI) Business School

  • Portrait of Kelly Kay smiling

    Kelly Kay

    Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles

  • Photo of Farha Ternikar

    Farha Ternikar

    Professor of Sociology and Director of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at Le Moyne College

  • Photo of Zygmunt J. B. Plater

    Zygmunt J. B. Plater

    Professor at Boston College Law School

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