The Department of is excited to welcome Chloe Ahmann to the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Environmental . Ahmann is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her work is based in late industrial Baltimore, where she explores climate change interventions that pose problems for environmental justice. Ahmann’s recent writing can be found in Cultural , American Ethnologist, SAPIENS, and Somatosphere. She is also working on a book titled Forgotten in Anticipation: Baltimore After Progress.
Forgotten in Anticipation explores the historical and embodied residues of future-oriented governance in south Baltimore over a 200-year period – from the area's 19th century life as a quarantine zone through its more recent past as the proposed site for "renewable" energy projects. Based on a decade of work among residents, activists, industrialists, and bureaucrats there, the book tells the story of a city built on profound uncertainties. And it considers how residents living in the wake of such uncertainties manage the everyday work of getting on. Ahmann is also beginning a project on climate adaptation called Vacant: Climate Crisis and the Unpeopling of Baltimore. In this emerging work, Ahmann investigates how the city's climate-adaptation planning process is resignifying vacant homes and crumbling infrastructure as "systemic vulnerabilities." Specifically, she asks how methods of governance and models of responsibility shift when climate interventions transform signs of chronic neglect into future-oriented problems. Both projects combine ethnographic research with intensive archival study, contributing to a research program that lies at the intersection of anthropology and urban history.
Ahmann is a graduate of George Washington University (Ph.D and M.A in ); Johns Hopkins University (M.S. in Education); and University of Chicago (B.A. in ). She will join the Department July 1, 2020 and will teach a Freshman Writing Seminar titled Time Travel in Fall 2020. In Spring 2021, Ahmann will teach of Climate Change (ANTHR 2482) and Proposal Development (ANTHR 6440).
We're excited to have Ahmann in the Department to teach and mentor students, and to take an ethnographic approach to the study of climate change.
We are delighted to have Professor Ahmann joining us in the fall.
