Karl Nycklemoe is an MCEAS Consortium Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Stony Brook University. His current research focuses on how U.S. expansionism and settler-colonization were contingent on usurping Indigenous communities’ aquatic governance by remaking the region's waters – lakes, rivers, wetlands, and floods – into an ‘open’ navigable resource.
Q: What drew you to the study of early America?
Nycklemoe: The Mississippi watershed. I originally joined my PhD program at Stony Brook with the goal of writing an environmental history of brackish Atlantic wetlands. However, one term paper during the Covid lockdown later, I began to focus more on the Upper Mississippi as I was more familiar with the archival source base for that region. The further I embraced the topic, the more I found that historians had not seriously considered the Upper Mississippi’s history before 1850. The watershed was not a wilderness, but part of a vast network of connections facilitated by Indigenous polities and peoples, and the community of other-than-humans who knew the water as their home.
Q: Who is an author that you think more early Americanists should read?
Nycklemoe: I will cheat in this answer and name two: Max Liboiron and Bathsheba Demuth. Liboiron’s book Pollution Is Colonialism is not an early American history, but provides compelling insight into the ethics of research, the reality of plastics in our world, colonialism, and kinship. Likewise, Demuth draws historians towards the Bering Straight in Floating Coast. Beginning with the birth of a bowhead whale in the late eighteenth century, Demuth largely follows U.S. and Russia empire, colonialism, and whaling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This may be the environmental historian in me, but both works unravel comfortable timelines of human history and nation states. How might history look different when written through the timeline of long-lived species and inorganic beings?
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Nycklemoe: When I look back, this project began in two moments. First, when I was a child a gathering of blue bell flowers in Rochester, MN were destroyed for what I believe was to build a runoff pond. Later, when I was an undergraduate at Luther College, I enrolled in the Environmental Forays class (thank you Dr. Brummel). In that course, part-discussion and part-field trip, we visited a slew of locales around Northeast Iowa, including a dairy farm, seedbank, fish farm, effigy mounds park, and rivers. Why, I wondered, are some parts of our world deemed replaceable, and others venerated? Why is it that the Mississippi is seen as both a body to reengineer and a place to preserve?
Q: What do you find most rewarding about the research process?
Nycklemoe: I find reviewing archival collections with only scant descriptions in finding aids to be the most rewarding part of the research process. Truthfully, sometimes this means spending hours going through papers that, in the end, had little to say about my current research. Thankfully, I have had the fortune to find a document that not only informs my research, but pushes me to reconsider the life and influence of rivers in history.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Nycklemoe: I can only praise the seminar series, as these series provide the fellows the opportunity to engage with works-in-progress beyond our normal reading lists. On one level, this means the visiting scholars and the Center are drawn into each other’s expertise and interests. This makes it possible to identify connections across histories and historiographies that can often be missed. But, on a personal level, the seminars have also been a crash course in scholarly decorum. My colleagues and mentors at the Center have modeled the art of asking thoughtful questions or critiques and have made me a better scholar and reader for it.
Karl Nycklemoe is an MCEAS Consortium Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Stony Brook University. Read more about his dissertation on his bio page.