Kieko Matteson is an environmental historian of France and an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. She developed an early interest in the history of land use and natural resource conservation while roving the forests and meadows of her family’s former Vermont farm. She completed her PhD at Yale University. At the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, she is revising her book manuscript, ‘Masters of Their Woods’: Conservation, Community, and Conflict in Revolutionary France, 1669–1848, an investigation of the vital and often violent struggles to control forest resources in the early modern and modern period, and the far-reaching policies that resulted from them.