Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Elizabeth Hennessy is an associate professor of history, history of science, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She completed her PhD in geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.
Her work combines political ecology, environmental history, science and technology studies, and multispecies studies to examine how histories of the life sciences have shaped the political economy of development and environmental governance in Latin America.
Her first book — On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden (Yale University Press, 2019) — was a finalist for a PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She co-leads the Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative project Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy in the Sciences and Medicine (HEAL).
Her work has also been funded by the U.S National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU-Munich.