Goucher College Hires Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies

Release date: February 25, 2008 |

Goucher College has hired Ariane de Bremond to be its first visiting professor of environmental studies.

In this position, de Bremond will lead initiatives to reinvigorate Goucher's commitment to environmental sustainability. She will help develop a plan to expand the curriculum offered in the college's environmental program, and she will teach one course a semester. De Bremond will also work with the college's new Environmental Sustainability Advisory Council, which researches and explores solutions to environmental issues raised by members of the Goucher community..

De Bremond comes to Goucher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was an environmental course instructor and visiting researcher for the Program for Community and Agroecology. Her doctorial research at the university focused on the social and ecological dimensions of conflict and peace and the political ramifications of land policy and environmental conservation.

Prior to that she spent two years working with the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington, D.C., as a Robert and Patricia Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellow in the Global Change Program. As a fellow, de Bremond researched the topic of ecological thresholds -- abrupt changes in biological systems associated with climate change -- and coordinated a program to bring scientists and policymakers together to develop strategies to deal with the effects of these climate-driven thresholds.

De Bremond's path to social-environmental scholarship began in 1989 when she was working for the United Nations Program for Displaced, Repatriated, and Refugees in El Salvador. She worked with ex-combatants of Salvadorian civil war and helped refugees resettle their conflict-torn lands. She later joined the Fundación Nacional para el Desarrollo (FUNDE), a research and development organization, where she worked with repatriated groups to create plans to manage their natural resources and held forums to deal with resource-use conflicts.
 
Bremond has been published in Third World Quarterly and the Journal of Environment and Development.

De Bremond earned her bachelor degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also attended the Universidad de Costa Rica, San Pedro and the Universidad de Alicante, Spain.