Ellen Arnold is a medieval historian at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her research area is the early and central Middle Ages, with a particular interest in medieval Germany and the Low Countries. She investigates the ways that medieval people incorporated nature and the environment into both their everyday life and into their cultural imagination. Her forthcoming book, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes, explores the ways that monastic communities told stories about both wilderness and domesticated nature, and how those stories became part of their historical and environmental imagination. Before coming to Ohio Wesleyan, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and at Macalester College, after receiving a PhD from the University of Minnesota. At the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies, she worked on her second major project, a history of medieval views of rivers and water control.