Brittany Lauren Wheeler

Dr. Wheeler holds degrees in English (BA), International Museum Studies (MA), Forced Migration (MA), and Geography (PhD) from institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. She has engaged her interests and concern with matters of responsibility, repatriation, historical and environmental justice, death-and-dying work, and the future of environmental migration in various research, teaching, editing, and project-based work.

Brittany has taught widely on themes of human-environment relationships, migration, global and local responsibility, research methodology, museums, and courses that introduce students to the world through various scales of geographic focus. She has taught all levels of university coursework, in multiple formats (large lecture, small seminar, one-on-one supervision, discussion labs). At OSU, she has taught Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, Introduction to Cultural Geography, Mixed Methods in Field Research, and Field Techniques and Geodata Collection. At other institutions she has taught Geographies of Responsibility & Repair, Climate Migration, Global Movements: Migrations, Refugees, and Diasporas, World Regional Geography, Human Geography, Global Geography, and Africa.

Her research focus has centered primarily around the moral and legal facets of displacement, compensation, and mobility as they have affected, challenged, and been contested by islanders and stakeholders based in the global oceanic south and diasporic communities (with particular focus on the Chagos and the Marshall Islands). Prior to her doctorate, her research has focused on collection history and tribal liaison in museums in service of repatriation, environmental migration in the context of the U.S.-Marshallese relationship, and the repatriation of the deceased from Johannesburg, South Africa to other African countries and cities.