Ellen Stroud is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, where she teaches U.S. Urban and Environmental History. Her first book, Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast, is part of University of Washingoton’s Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series, and she is currently finishing her second book, an environmental history of corpse disposal in the United States. Her scholarship has been supported by the EPA, the NSF, the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Warren Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and her recent articles on the dead body project have been published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and Modern American History. As a CHI fellow, she is beginning work on a new project, on the challenges of measuring the natural world.