About
The Stanford Environmental History Working Group brings together students and faculty to work towards increased institutionalization of environmental history at Stanford. Our student community spans from multiple sub-fields, including History of Science, African History, Latin American History, British History, South Asian History, Eastern European History, and Transnational History, and also includes students in law, communications, comparative literature, and other fields. While the Working Group was formed in 2024, we are working to build upon the rich tradition of environmental and spatial history at Stanford, particularly as inaugurated by Professor Richard White as well as the work of the longstanding Stanford Environmental and Climate History Workshop.
Team
Mariana Calvo
TeamMariana Calvo is a second-year History PhD Student at Stanford University in Transnational, International, and Global history with a focus on telegraph history. More specifically, she is interested in the lived experiences of a small diaspora of British...
Julia Fine
TeamJulia Fine is a PhD student at Stanford University in the field of British history. She is broadly focused on the food and environmental history of the British Empire, with a particular interest in the relationship between shifting energy and agriculture regimes...
Miri Powell
TeamMiri Powell is a PhD student in the Transnational, International, and Global field. Her work focuses on histories of technology, infrastructure, and environment in the twentieth century. She has pursued these interests through research on objects ranging from...
Zephyr Frank
TeamZephyr Frank is Professor of History and the Director of the Program on Urban Studies, and is the Faculty Advisor for the Environmental History Working Group. He was also the founding Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) 2011-16. His...
Community
Graduate Students
Rachel Bergmann
Graduate Student Rachel Bergmann is a PhD student in Communication at Stanford University. Her work uses historical and interpretive methods to analyze information technologies and their cultural contexts. Previously, she worked as the Research Assistant for Microsoft...
Alina Bykova
Graduate StudentAlina Bykova is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History. Her research interests include Arctic and Soviet environmental history with a focus on energy and industry. Alina is writing her dissertation on the history of energy and extraction...
Marina Del Cassio
Graduate StudentMarina Del Cassio is a Ph.D. student in the Stanford Department of History and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is currently working on a legal and cultural history of wildfire and land burning in long-nineteenth-century California. Her...
Aliyah Dunn Salahudin
Graduate StudentDunn-Salahuddin’s research explores the history of the Black freedom struggle in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point filtered through the lens of environment, race, and infrastructure. Primarily focusing on the Bayview-Hunters Point community of the...
Mahishan Gnanaseharan
Graduate Student I am broadly interested in the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. Within this broad area, I focus on the migrations of Tamil-speaking laborers from British...
Ciel Haviland
Graduate StudentCiel is a PhD student in the History of Science. Fascinated by human-plant relationships, she is focusing on Early Modern North American and European understandings of plants. Her research explores indigenous and European understandings of the plant...
Annelisa Kingsbury Lee
Graduate StudentAnnelisa Kingsbury Lee is a law student at Stanford University. She is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and Sallyanne Payton Fellow. Her undergraduate work in environmental history focused on the political economy of energy in modern Chinese provinces. At the...
Janice Ndegwa
Graduate StudentJanice studies the history of science and technology, religion, mobilities, and the environment in East and Central Africa. She is particularly interested in locating contemporary technological developments within longer regional histories by examining...
Gabriel Panuco Mercado
Graduate StudentGabriel is a Ph.D. student in Latin American history. He is interested in the gender, food, and labor history of rural Mexico and its migrant communities during the mid and late twentieth century. His research explores how women from rural Jalisco...
William Parish IV
Graduate StudentWilliam is a PhD candidate in Transnational, International, and Global History with a focus on Native American and Indigenous Studies. More specifically, he studies the transnational dimensions of Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy in the Americas....
Adele Stock
Graduate StudentAdele is a fifth year PhD candidate in the Africa field who works at the intersections of environment, infrastructure, and religious life. They have conducted research in Johannesburg, Kampala, and Accra on the relationship between spiritually...
Vannessa Velez
Graduate StudentVannessa is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history with an interest in racial capitalism, science and technology studies, and urban environmental inequality. Her dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro Atlanta’s rapid economic...
Narusa Yamato
Graduate StudentNarusa Yamato is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. Her research explores the relationship between imperialism and capitalism by studying the rise of the Japanese dairy industry from 1850-1952. This project also draws on her other...
Sonya Schoenberger
Graduate StudentSonya Schoenberger is a PhD Candidate in the field of Transnational, International, and Global History and is a JD Candidate at Yale Law School. Her work explores environmental and legal histories of empire and colonial violence in the Pacific. Her...
Alumni
Belinda Ramírez
AlumniBelinda Ramírez (they/them) is a first-generation Colombian-American queer farmer-scholar. They received their PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California San Diego and most recently completed a postdoc as a Civic, Liberal, and Global...
Paul Nauert
AlumniPaul G. Nauert is a global environmental historian whose research and teaching interests include the responsibility of the American Empire in accelerating the climate crisis, the geopolitics of climate (in)justice, war and ecology, environmental justice studies,...