Hayden Nelson, President

Email: hayden.l.nelson@ku.edu

As president of the ECC, I help coordinate the more specialized activities of other officers. I also represent the ECC in communicating with ASEH leadership and am an ex officio voting member of ASEH's Executive Council.

Hayden L. Nelson is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Kansas where he specializes in environmental history in the nineteenth-century North American West. His dissertation is a forest history of the North Woods region of northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and Ontario's Lake Superior watershed. 

Donal Thomas, President-Elect

Email: donal.thomas@stonybrook.edu

Donal Thomas is the President-Elect of the Early Career Caucus. he will transition into the role of President following the ASEH 2025 Annual Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Donal is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of History at Stony Brook University, where he specializes in environmental history with a focus on global Indigenous histories, knowledge transfer, science, medicine, and borderlands. He is one of the founders and editors of the website Crisis and Catharsis, a digital humanities initiative.

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Event Coordinator

Email: kbrig1@jhmi.edu

As Event Coordinator, Kristin designs, plans, and implements events that benefit ECC members, especially those focused on professional development, networking, and workshopping. If you have an event you would like to see or put on, please reach out to her via email or the ECC Discord.

Kristin Brig-Ortiz is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine, Science, and Technology at Johns Hopkins University, where she specializes in public health and the environment in colonial Africa. Her dissertation explores how different styles of water management from municipal officials, residents, and the environment itself affected public health interventions in South African port cities.

Marissa Crannell-Ash, Communications Director

Email: mcrannel@ur.rochester.edu

Marissa is the Communications Director for the Early Career Caucus and coordinates communication from the Caucus leadership to the members via the ECC listserv. She also maintains the ECC Discord server.

Marissa Crannell-Ash is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Rochester where she specializes in more-than-human medieval communities. Her dissertation is an investigation of the executions of pigs in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Burgundy for the murders of human children and the roles of pigs in the communities in which those murders occurred. 

Jasmine Brown, Conference Coordinator

Email: brown993@msu.edu

I am the Conference Coordinator for the ASEH Early Career Caucus. My role focuses on organizing social outings and networking opportunities for the Early Career Caucus during the ASEH Conference.

I am a Forestry PhD student at Michigan State University inventorying African and African American Forest History in the United States (1539-present). By looking at forests and the forestry profession, my work sheds light on the overwhelming ecological knowledge of African Americans that spanned species such as oaks, southern pines and sycamores, as well as industries such as paper, pulp, shipbuilding, turpentining and much more.

Kate Carpenter, Mentorship Coordinator

Email: kbc@princeton.edu

Kate is the ECC Mentorship Coordinator. She is working to establish a mentorship program in ASEH to pair early career researchers with experienced colleagues to connect multiple generations of environmental historians.

Kathryn (Kate) Carpenter is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University who works at the intersection of history of science and environmental history. She is also the creator and host of the podcast Drafting the Past about the craft of writing history.