Dan Vandersommers is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of Dayton. His research interests reside at the intersection of environmental history, animal studies, science studies, and posthumanism. He specifically writes about zoos and zoology, circa 1850-1950. And he is author of Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive (University Press of Kansas, 2023), which was the culmination of his dissertation research. In his graduate studies at Ohio State, and under the guidance of Randy Roth, Chris Otter, and John Brooke, Dan learned how to see both the "micro" and the "macro" together. He learned how to "see" historical sources at multiple scales simultaneously. He is currently writing a global history of zoos for Reaktion and is beginning a monograph project about goldfish breeding and aquarium supply chains in the late-nineteenth century. Dan volunteers regularly at Equi-Sense, a non-profit based in Sebastopol, California, that offers trauma-informed experiential learning with horses for underserved populations and children in the foster care system. He also loves disc golf and hiking!