Common Highways Forever Free: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi Watershed 1784-1884
Karl is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Stony Brook University, where he also completed an advanced certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. His current research focuses on how US expansionism and settler-colonization was contingent on usurping Indigenous communities’ aquatic governance by remaking the region's waters – lakes, rivers, wetlands, and floods – into an ‘open’ navigable resource. This project asks: How did the US federal government build the authority to legislate, administer, and manipulate the Upper Mississippi when Indigenous governance clearly held authority in the region as late as the early nineteenth century? How might science (particularly natural history and geology) and law intersect in remaking a river as a material, legal, and cultural being? How do histories of inland, terraqueous spaces nominally within the United States change when water is the central analytic?
More broadly, Karl is an Americanist who draws from environmental history, science and technology studies, and histories of settler-colonialism, race, and Indigeneity to ask how people produce meaning about environmental spaces, events, and bodies. His work is published in the academic journal Middle West Review, and he has also contributed to the Minnesota encyclopedia Mnopedia and the digital history project Crisis and Catharsis.