Overview
Clay Capra is a fourth-year doctoral candidate researching the intersections between crusade ideology and the environment in the long 12th century. With his research, he hopes to combine threads of environmental work already being done in the historiographies of monasticism and settler-colonialism with scholarship on the crusades. In particular, he is interested in the monastic ideal of the "wasteland," referenced in Latin by words such as "desertum" or "solitudinem" and its transmission through crusade ideology. He is also a proud member of Duke Graduate Students Union.