Hannah Nyala West is a tracker and writer by trade, an ethnographer and maritime environmental historian by training, and a Ph.D. candidate currently working on a dissertation titled, "At Sea in the World (Or, The UnNatural Histories of a Ship): The Cruise of the U.S. Frigate ESSEX, 1798-1837." Her scholarly research is transoceanic in scope, relies on both historical and ethnographic methods, and focuses on questions of cultural memory, the poetics of power and the politics of performance, and the historical interactions between humans and non-humans. Her forthcoming nonfiction book, Tracking at the Future, chronicles a stint of fieldwork in the Kalahari and Namib Deserts.