Growing up in the coastal plains of the Lower Cape Fear in North Carolina, David Biggs traded his childhood pastimes of fishing, surfing and swamp exploration for a professional career in environmental history to understand how changes to rivers, estuaries and wet lands are important to understanding human history and our present-day ecological crisis. His dissertation, "Between the Rivers and Tides: A Hydraulic History of the Mekong Delta, 1820-1975," reflects the transposition of his love affair with water and history at home to a thriving agricultural region in Vietnam. Once finding himself in the cities, backroads and ricefields of Vietnam, he decided that he liked it enough to spend over six years there as a teacher and a student of Vietnamese language and culture. He is currently working on expanding the dissertation into a book on the Mekong Delta and is writing a monograph on land surveys involving spatial analyses of historic land use maps to assess spatial patterns of environmental change in the past. When he's not in the archives, the classroom or a quagmire, David enjoys creating place-based, mixed-media sculptures that often incorporate historical or cultural themes or material in their construction. His teaching interests include Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and environmental history.