University of Chicago Archives

Dr. Trevor Price, PhD, FRS, is an expert on the effects of climate on the distribution of species. He has a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a PhD in quantitative genetics from the University of Michigan. He is a tenured faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago

Dr. Price teaches courses in environmental ecology and biostatistics. His book, Ecology of a Changed World (Oxford University Press, 2022) summarizes the threats and challenges to the natural world in the 21st century. It forms the basis for the undergraduate courses he teaches to both biology majors and biology non-majors.

Dr. Price’s general research interests are in the distribution of biodiversity across the Himalaya and in the Indian subcontinent wherein he asks questions such as: why are there twice as many species in the east Himalaya (e.g. Sikkim) than in the west Himalaya (e.g. Himachal Pradesh)? Why are there more species in the mid-elevations in the Himalaya than at lower or higher elevations? What are the ongoing impacts of climate change and land-use change on the distribution of bird species? To tackle these questions, he studies birds and trees and uses various molecular techniques to assess the relationships among species and populations. He has published on these issues in journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

Dr. Price is a former Guggenheim and Mercator fellow at the University of Cologne (2004). In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2022, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Dr. Price’s Fulbright-Kalam project is building on the baseline data collected from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Himachal Pradesh, on bird abundances. The goals are to: extend research on birds in the breeding season in Himachal Pradesh, especially integrating the work by students from the host institution; expand the research from birds to birch trees, because birch is so important to the local communities; monitor bird populations in the winter in the Indian peninsula; teach at the University of Ladakh; and visit several institutions to disseminate findings and to learn more about what others are discovering.

Sarah Levenstam is pursuing a doctoral degree in the anthropology of religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School, in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MA in religious studies, also from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and a dual BA in religious studies and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah’s doctoral dissertation examines ideas and practices of dog management and care across India and Britain against the backdrop of imperial and national public works projects, international humanitarianism, and transnational animal welfare movements from 1857 through the present.

At the University of Chicago, Sarah’s research has been generously supported by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Divinity School. She has received Critical Language Scholarships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, COSAS Fellowships, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Scholarship for language studies in Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit. She has previously worked in international education at World Learning, in historical and archival research for Hudson Institute, and in accessibility advocacy and community outreach with Rubin Museum of Art and the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. She also fosters dogs for an animal shelter in Chicago.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Hayes research is tracing the transformation of the legal status of free-roaming dogs from straying “ferae naturae”, contained and culled in 19th-century colonial Calcutta, to legally-recognized “street dogs” who have accrued material and moral value in today’s Kolkata. She is looking at how dogs have inhabited this changing city and how the metrics of evaluating them as valuable or disposable have changed with time. She is also studying what the connected histories of dogs and humans together navigating this city’s public spaces reveal about cross-species hierarchies, practices of place-making, and claims of belonging in Kolkata.