Institute for Research in the Humanities

Caroline Gottschalk

Position title: UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Senior Fellow (2025–2029)

Address:
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, English, UW–Madison

This is a blonde woman in a t-shirt and sunglasses looking at the camera and pointing at a beaver lodge and dam behind her.

Mending Rivers

The book manuscript, “Mending Rivers,” is a collaboration with my Michigan-based research partner, J. Marty Holtgren. In it, we work through three pairs of interlinked body chapters that first narrate a particular origin story for the seemingly stable “post-settlement” present of property arrangements, species assemblages, and river courses in West Michigan, and then deconstruct and repurpose this accretion through a proposed methodology of mending. The manuscript offers a textured picture of how the control and management of Michigan’s hydrology was fundamental to occupation and extraction, how these logics continue to guide contemporary property relations and stream management, and how settlers like me can work with Tribal partners to begin to destabilize and reconfigure them.

Dr. Caroline Gottschalk’s work and life are shaped by rivers and the people who live with them. A Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Gottschalk uses her academic training in community-driven research, rhetorical studies, and freshwater science to take a community-driven, field-based approach to intervening in the logics and practices of river restoration and management. Dr. Gottschalk has presented internationally on her work, published widely across rhetorical studies and environmental sciences, and received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, US Environmental Protection Agency, and AAUW and funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Park Service. Her interdisciplinary work began with a B.A. in Social Work at the University of Iowa (1999), a concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies, a fellowship in the NSF-IGERT program in Landscape, Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes, and a Ph.D. in English Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011), and continued with a M.S. in stream ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2021).