My name is Matt Bauerlin. I'm a M.S. student in the Department of Geography with specialties in critical human geography and human-environment interactions. My research interests broadly lie at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and critical human geography in the American South. I’m interested in how vulnerable populations in the region cope with the simultaneous realities of neoliberal capitalism and climate change.
I earned my B.S. from Clemson University in 2016, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Geography. While at Clemson, I engaged in research applying programmatic analysis and natural language processing to a large corpus of written news articles with the intent to identify named and anonymous sourcing practices within them. After graduation, I was employed as a software developer for several years working on a variety of projects. These experiences helped me to cultivate programming knowledge and techniques as well as the ability to apply them creatively to problems in the humanities. I hope to build upon these skills and to fill out my methodological toolkit as I further my studies into human geographic topics.
During my time at Penn State, I intend to research the intersections of race, nature, capital, and society with a lens towards social and environmental justice. I hope to build upon these topics through my studies with the eventual goal of better understanding how vulnerable populations encounter and survive the hazards of a changing climate and the mechanisms of 21st century oppression.