My current research activities focus on revision of my doctoral dissertation, which is an environmental history of public health pests and pest control in US cities and suburbs since about 1900. In it I examine pests of domestic space, specifically: animals such as roaches, rats, bedbugs, mosquitoes, and house flies, and the technologies people have used to manage them. I am interested in the ways institutions like health departments have delineated “public” and “private” responsibility for pest control at the scale of the home and the neighborhood. My research reveals that class, race, gender, and urban space have also influenced the ways communities grappled with nature in cities. I have also been involved in collaborative research concerning the history of wild and domestic animals in humanized landscapes, particularly legal and management approaches to human-animal conflict. My Master’s thesis also examines the social geography of human-animal interactions in the urban landscape, specifically New York City’s Central Park.

2008 D. Biehler. Back-Alley Ecology; Or, Bringing People, Urban Animals, and Public Health into Environmental History. Canadian History and Environment Summer School, Vancouver, BC.

2008. D. Biehler. Permeable Homes: Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Pesticides in Public Housing Since 1937. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, MA.

2007. L. Naughton, D. Biehler (presenter). Wildlife Conservation and Moral Authority Over Nature: When Wolves and Dogs Misbehave. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, CA.

2007. D. Biehler. Pest-Free Living? Pest Control, Regulation, and the Science of the Home Environment, 1945-1975. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Baton Rouge, LA.

2006 D. Biehler. An Environmental History of Pesticide Resistance in US Urban Neighborhoods: Rodent Bodies and the Geography of Containment. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, IL.

2005 D. Biehler. Environmental Histories of Pest Control, Public Health, and US Urban Neighborhoods. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Denver, CO.

2004 D. Biehler. Who Let the Dogs Out? Race, Urban Ecology, and Pet Practices in 1970s Baltimore. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Philadelphia, PA.

2003 D. Biehler. ‘A Risk You Can’t Quantify Isn’t Worth Taking’: Toward a Critique of Brownfields Policy, Knowledge, and Neoliberalism. Contested Urban Futures Conference, University of Minnesota Department of Geography.

2003 D. Biehler. From Pigtown to Pastoral City: Animals, Class, and Nature in New York City’s Central Park, 1850-1900. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, New Orleans, LA.

2007 President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship, University of British Columbia Department of Geography

2007 Historical Geography Specialty Group, Doctoral-Level Paper Award

2006 Vilas Travel Award, University of Wisconsin – Madison

2006 American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship

2006 Writing Across the Curriculum Teaching Fellow, University of Wisconsin – Madison

2005 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant

Geography of Human Activities; Geographies of Health and Disease; Seminar in Medical Geography: Environment, Society, and Health