Short Bio:
Lisa J. Powell is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies and the Sustainability Portfolio Program at the University of Texas at Austin.   Her current research focuses on gateway communities to national parks.  She is also works on agriculture, rural land use, floodways, and cultural geography.  She is one of the co-authors of a forthcoming book on Central Texas barbecue which will be published by the University of Texas Press.  Lisa holds a B.A. and M.S. in mathematics from Harvard and Vanderbilt Universities, respectively. She likes to hike, grow plants, cook, and attempt to play the banjo, and she takes every opportunity she has to spend time working on her family's farm in Kentucky.

• National parks, tourism, agriculture, sustainability, floodways, rural land use, cultural geography

• Teaching assistant in engineering and in interior design, calculus instructor, residence life professional, web exhibition content developer for an archive, mathematics researcher, corn pollinator.

• Co-author, Stories Beyond the Brisket: Life and Times of Central Texas Barbecue (title may change before printing), University of Texas Press, forthcoming (2009).

• At assorted conferences; including the American Society for Environmental History, Southern Floodways Alliance, Western History Association, Southwest Division of the Association of American Geographers, Western States Folklore Society, and the Joint Mathematics Meetings

• Farming, hiking, bouldering, cooking, knitting, yoga, collecting oral histories, learning the banjo