Maria Alejandra Peréz is more interdisciplinary than most of us. Both a Prof-Doc Fellow in the Department of Geology and Geography and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Maria studies the intersection of culture and society with caves and the karst landscape. Originally from Venezuela and currently conducting research in the United States, Maria focuses on cross-cultural attitudes toward cave modification, a topic about which many karst scientists are passionate. She says, “Exploring human-cave relations, from a historical, phenomenological, and political perspective provides broader context to speleological practices.” Maria brings this knowledge to her work with KWI to convene a specialty conference on Culture and Karst. Co-conveners Dorothy Vesper and Bill Jones find Maria’s perspective to be essential to building a conference program that will appeal to historians, authors, anthropologists, and karst scientists.
