Grant Mongin is a first-year Ph.D. student in History at the University of Oregon whose research focuses on the intersections of environmental history, borderlands history, and the history of science. His dissertation is a social and environmental history of the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Baja California through the long twentieth century. It draws on archival sources, ethological field notes, scientific publications, nature documentaries, popular culture, and oral histories to examine how professional cetologists (whale scientists), oceanographers, and everyday people in Baja California developed the wetlands in El Vizcaíno as “natural” and socioecological spaces. His dissertation locates cultural anxieties about environmental futures in the bodies of animals and traces the development of protectionist policies for animals and landscapes in Mexico.
Grant’s master’s thesis recovers the emergence of the “universal gray whale” and the “modern cetologist” as co-constitutive processes rooted in formal scientific tools for representing the bodies of whales as abstractions and the role of touch as an affective encounter between researcher and whale that connected cetologists with “real” whales, beyond numeric representation.
Other Publication(s):
Mongin, Grant. “Who Is the ‘One Best Man?’: Taylorism and Personality Tests, 1924-1955.” Labor History 66, no.1 (April 2024): 77–89. doi:10.1080/0023656X.2024.2342421.
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