Melissa Charenko studies scientists’ attempts to understand climate change and its implications. Her book, Climate by Proxy (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) traces how scientists read the record of past climate. It focuses on those who reconstructed the past using organic and inorganic remains such as tree rings, pollen, and ice cores. These proxies indirectly record the ebb and flow of climate over thousands of years. Scientists needed to develop techniques to interpret this record. Once they did, they then used it to explain human history and destiny. Climate by Proxy demonstrates how material objects worked with scientists’ perceptions of human groups to compel, constrain, and reinforce their understandings of climate, history, and the future.
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
history of climate, history of ecology, history of paleo-sciences, environmental history
Biology and Society
Climate and Change
Charenko, Melissa, “American Blitzkrieg or Ecological Indian,” in New Earth Histories, eds., Alison Bashford, Adam Bobbette, Emily Kern, University of Chicago Press, (2023): 247-262.
Charenko, Melissa, “Blowing in the Wind: Calibrating Pollen’s Mobility as a Challenge to Measuring Climate by Proxy, 1916-1939,” Journal of the History of Biology 55, (2022): 465-93.
Charenko, Melissa, “Reconstructing Climate: Paleoecology and the Limits of Prediction during the 1930s Dust Bowl,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1-2:50 (2020): 90-128.
Austin, Jeanie, Melissa Charenko, Michelle Dillon and Jodi Lincoln, “Systematic Oppression and the Contested Ground of Information Access for Incarcerated People,” Open Information Science 4 (2020): 169-186.