Michael Mayerfeld Bell is an associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mike is principally an environmental sociologist, but he also conducts research on culture, economic sociology, sustainable agriculture, community, place, rural society, inequality, gender, the body, democracy, and social theory. Two central themes can be heard in all of his work: dialogics and the sociology of "nature," broadly conceived. Mike is the author of Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (University of Chicago Press, 1994), which was co-winner of the 1995 Outstanding Book Award of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. He is the author, along with Gregory Peter, Susan Jarnagin, and Donna Bauer, of the forthcoming book Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). The second edition of his An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Pine Forge Press [Sage]), 1998) will appear in 2004. Mike has also worked as a geologist, and is the author of The Face of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (State of Connecticut, 1985), which won an American Library Association award. Mike continues to have a second life as a part-time composer of songs, fiddle tunes, and classical music.

He also plays mandolin in an old-time string band, the Barn Owl Band , which recently appeared on the national public radio show A Prairie Home Companion. He is currently at work on a string quartet, a suite for piano, and a symphonic poem. You can learn more about Mike's work and passions at http://www.michaelmbell.net.