Mark Pedelty

College of Liberal Arts
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
(612) 625-6383
pedeltmh@umn.edu

Mark Pedelty is an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts. He is currently completing a documentary about Metro Blooms' "A Neighborhood of Raingardens" project in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. The first season of the film appeared on TPT's Minnesota Channel and the final version will be distributed nationally in Fall 2011.

Pedelty joined the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 1998, after starting his career at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and Miami University in Ohio. In 2005, after receiving the BMI Foundation’s Woody Guthrie Fellowship, Pedelty began investigating the relationship between popular music and the environment, focusing on Guthrie’s Columbia River songs and activism. He has published two books based on long-term ethnographic field research. A third is soon to be released, a study of the ecosystemic roles of popular music. Pedelty is interested in the role played by anthropogenic variables in ecosystems, including human communication and creative expression.

Pedelty's teaching includes a graduate seminar in environmental communication. He has created a literary journalism course for Fall 2011 based on the theme "This Land is Your Land." Students in that course will document real and potential changes in land and water using creative long-form multimedia journalism. An active contributor to UMN's Learning Abroad and Internationalizing the Curriculum efforts, Pedelty is planning a field-based environmental communication course in Mexico as an extension of previous Study Abroad Seminars he has taught in Latin America.

See Pedelty's faculty page for more info.

Mark Pedelty

BEYOND THE BIO

  • Environmental Hero:
    Becky Rice of Metro Blooms
  • Fun Fact:
    Once wrote a commentary for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Academic Travel Causes Global Warming".
  • Favorite Read:
    Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac by David Pitt-Brooke
  • Favorite Quote:
    Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. - Bill Vaughan