Kevin Bloomfield (Cornell) is a second year graduate student studying Roman history. His research focuses on the environment-society climate nexus in the Roman world. More specifically, he studies the confluence of climate change and political history in the Late Roman and Late Antique periods.

​Isacar Bolaños (Ohio State) is a PhD candidate in the Ottoman history program at OSU. His dissertation combines methodologies from environmental history and the history of medicine to examine Ottoman efforts to improve water management, commercial agriculture, and public health in Ottoman Iraq during the Ottoman Empire’s nineteenth-century modernization efforts.

Yuan Chen (Yale) is a PhD student in the History Department. She received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale, A.M. In Astrophysics from Harvard, and bachelor’s degree in Physics from Beijing University. Her research interests include the environmental history of pre-modern China, the Song dynasty, and the non-Han Chinese dynasties founded by nomadic people. Her recent article, “Legitimation Discourse and the Theory of the Five Elements in Imperial China,” just appeared in the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies.

Meredith Denning (Georgetown) is completing a PhD in the environmental history of transboundary water management. She is curious about how local people work across borders to participate in governing their home waters. Over the past year, she has been organizing workshops in digital humanities and learning more about non-traditional tools like interactive maps, websites, and ‘born digital’ archives. Meredith has presented her research at conferences in Toronto, Munich, and, most recently, Beijing.

Sam Dolbee (NYU) is a PhD candidate in NYU's program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. His dissertation is entitled "The Locust and the Starling: People, Insects, and Disease in the Ottoman Jazira and After, 1860-1935," and is based on fieldwork in France, Lebanon, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. 

Kenneth Linden (Indiana) is a PhD student in the Central Eurasian Studies Department. He studies Mongolian animal and environmental history. His dissertation research is on the transformation of Mongolian’s relations with animals and the environment in socialist Mongolia. Kenneth is particularly interested in herding practices and technologies, and wolf extermination campaigns. He plans to continue his preliminary research by conducting archival research in Mongolia during the upcoming academic year.

Timothy Lorek (Yale) is a PhD candidate in history. His dissertation, "Developing Paradise: Agricultural Science in Colombia's Cauca Valley, 1927-1967" examines a long history of agronomy in a Latin American tropical river valley. He is also co-organizer of the international conference "Experts and Expertise in Cold War Latin America," recently held at Yale, and coordinator of Yale's Agrarian Studies program.

Erica Mukherjee (Stony Brook) is a PhD candidate in history. Her dissertation, “Imagined Infrastructure: Railways, Embankments, and Canals in Colonial Bengal, 1820-60,” explores the ways in which environmentally-embedded infrastructure projects embodied the sovereign goals of the East India Company. Erica spent the past year in Kolkata on a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship.

Ariana Myers (Princeton) is a third-year PhD candidate in history. She specializes in the study of medieval Iberia and North Africa, a region distinguished by its geographic diversity, religious pluralism, and importance as a point of contact between Latin Christendom and Dār al-Islām. She received her undergraduate degree from Ripon College in 2014, summa cum laude, majoring in History, Classical Languages, and Spanish.
​Header image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum