Swanson’s research explores how cultural histories shape landscape ecologies (and vice-versa). She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Hokkaido, Japan, examining how the island’s histories of salmon fisheries management have transformed its salmon populations. Her book in progress, Caught in Comparisons: The Making of Japanese Salmon, probes how the political-economic development of “modern Japan” came to physically alter the bodies and genes of these fish in unexpected ways. In 2015-16, Swanson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, Norway, where she participated in the “Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene” project.