Meet the Speakers!

Richard McKinley Mizelle, Jr. is associate professor of history at the University of Houston. His research, writing, and lecturing focuses on the history of race and healthcare politics, chronic disease, environmental health, and the historical connections between gender, identity, and ethnicity in medicine. Mizelle is the author of Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and co-editor of Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita (Brookings Institution Press, 2011). His work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals and publications including the Lancet, ISIS, Journal of African American History, History Compass, Open Rivers Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the American Historian Magazine. His research has also been quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, and he has appeared and consulted on numerous local and national podcasts including NPR Throughline and the Atlantic’s Floodlines.

Benjamin Clark is a PhD student in IUPUI’s American Studies program, with a concentration in applied anthropology. He works as a research assistant at the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute on a project called the Anthropocene Household, which looks at the current epoch at the local level by examining the household as a way to understand lived experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with environmental change. Ben’s research interests include critical environmental justice, the role of white supremacy in environmental racism, and using ethnographic methods in environmental justice studies. He holds an MA in public history, also from IUPUI, and has worked as a historian for Indiana’s state parks system for more than a decade