People

Longue durée; Environmental and maritime history; Niger Delta; oil politics.

Indigenous science and technology studies; Indigenous religions under the law; hikuri Peyote cactus; anticolonial and decolonial movement; materiality of psychedelics

ethnobotany; oral history; gender; Indian Ocean slave trade networks; traditional medicine and healing systems in Madagascar and Tanzania.

Latin American history; cartography; religious history.

modern Eastern European history; modern Western Europe; environmental, political and social history of Poland; ports; post-World War II urban reconstruction; postwar communism and resistance.

Environmental governance; international and environmental systems; history of science; political ecology.

Latin American history; environmental history; development and indigenous politics in twentieth-century Latin America.

nineteenth and twentieth century US environmental history; North American West; race and identity; rural space and place; federal land management; transportation infrastructure.

Southeast Asia; environmental history; Science and Technology Studies, Cold War, urban history

History of Science and Technology; Landscape; Architecture; Agriculture; Infrastructure

Modern South Asian, Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean history; the history of migration and diasporas; environmental history, especially the history of water and climate; the history of port cities

Science and medicine in the age of Enlightenment: the involvement of the human body in electrical experiments, the material culture of science, science and secrecy

Environmental anthropology, climate and society, South and Southeast Asia

Medieval social history, the history of Spain, comparative studies of the peasantry, and history of food and cuisine. 

African history, environmental history, colonialism, history of the slave trade. 

Southeast Asian history, environmental History of Viet Nam, history of genocide, climate, agriculture

Environmental history of the early modern and modern Middle East, history of human-animal relations, irrigation and natural resource management, agrarian history

United States environmental history, energy politics, environmental humanities, political, legal, and economic history

Environmental history and political anthropology of forests, agriculture, human-animal relations, and urban environments in India

History of Southeast Asia; History of Indian Ocean; History of Islamic World; Environmental History; History of Infrastructure; Legal History

Environmental history; East Asian history; Middle Period; conquest dynasties; forestry and militarization; food and culture; urban ecology; frontier and borderland. 

Sigma Colón studies the intersections of spatial analysis, environmental, and cultural politics from the late 19th through the 21st century. Her dissertation, “Rivers Seen and Unseen,” examines popular accounts of river regions as vehicles for representing and altering the exploitation of people and rivers. In addition to her work on river systems, as a member of the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture she has published work on invasive species as a kind of occupation tied to racialized geographies, as well as on the political economy of nature that examines environmental degradation and reparation for that destruction as liabilities and as forms of indebtedness within the context of the Global North-South divide. 

Keri Lambert is a PhD student specializing in twentieth-century African and environmental history. Her dissertation, “Planting Trees, Tapping Ghanaians: Cultivating Rubber and Nationhood in 20th Century Ghana,” will explore the ways in which farmers, the state, and transnational companies consolidated land, labor, and capital to develop rubber plantations in colonial and post-colonial Ghana. The rubber industry presents a particularly useful case to observe how Ghanaians in rural areas of the peripheral Western Region have engaged with hegemonic institutions and resources – both natural and social – in dynamic ways throughout political and economic reforms during the colonial and post-colonial eras. She is advised by Bob Harms, and her dissertation committee includes Paul Sabin, Dan Magaziner, and Jeffrey Ahlman (from Smith College).

mountains; environmental history; Tokugawa Japan; early modern Japan.

material culture; extreme environments; history of exploration, polar regions; history of anthropology; British and American imperialism; indigenous approaches to environment.

Ashanti Shih was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. In 2011, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in History and Art Practice. Her undergraduate thesis explored the history of Japan’s nuclear energy program, focusing on the controversial use of American nuclear fuel in the 1970s. At Yale, Ashanti studies the history of ecology and environmental history in the Pacific region. Her dissertation, tentatively titled, “Alien Ecologies: Conservation and Identity in Twentieth-century Hawai‘i,” focuses on the history of “species mixing” and invasion biology in the islands. Ashanti will use the national parks as a case study to explore the relationship between ecological categories, conservation practices, and the people of Hawai‘i. Her research and travel has been supported by the Richard U. Light Foundation, the MacMillan Center, the National Science Foundation, and the Bogaty/Crowley Fund for Japanese History and Japanese Studies.

Ashanti is committed to building community around social justice issues. She is active in the Asian American community at Yale and helped found the History, Science, and Justice Collective. She chairs the Earth and Environment Forum (EEF) of the History of Science Society, and contributes to the following online initiatives: Teach311.org, and Seeds: New Research in Environmental History.

History of ecology, environmental history, Asian American history, Pacific Islander studies, Asian studies, STS, visual studies, colonialism and occupation.

History of the American West, frontiers, and borderlands

European social and political history, the history of medicine, the history of epidemics