Frederica Bowcutt is a botany professor at The Evergreen State College where she has taught in interdisciplinary programs since 1996. Her undergraduate courses include Botany: Plants and People, Global Studies: Plants and Empire, and Restoring Landscapes: Picturing Plants. Her MES courses include Ecofeminism, Environmental History, and Floristic Research. She also serves as Director of the Evergreen Biodiversity Center (formerly called the Natural History Museum). Her books include The Tanoak Tree: An Environmental History of a Pacific Coast Hardwood which examines the complex history of cultural, sociopolitical, and economic factors affecting people’s radically different perceptions of this common hardwood tree. Her second book, Vascular Plants of the South Sound Prairies resulted from collaboration with undergraduate and MES students to document the flora and historical ecology of south Coast Salish camas prairies and their associated oak woodlands. These cultural landscapes were actively managed with fire by Indigenous peoples for hundreds if not thousands of years to favor edible, medicinal, and fiber plants that either don’t thrive or are not found in the dominant conifer forests of the region. She is a contributor to A Cultural History of Plants and The Cultural Value of Trees: Folk Value and Biocultural Conservation. Her current research is focused on the place of women in the cotton landscapes of the American South. She holds a bachelors from the University of California, Berkeley and a masters from the University of California at Davis (UC Davis), both in botany. Her Ph.D. in ecology is from UC Davis. For a more complete list of my publications and professional experience, please visit my website bowcutt.net.

Connect with me at: bowcuttf@evergreen.edu