People

An environmental historian who bridges the humanities and sciences, Degroot studies how communities responded to abrupt environmental changes on Earth and across the Solar System. His work uses the past to offer fresh perspectives on the environmental challenges of the future.

De Luna studies early African history by bringing archaeological, linguistic, paleoenvironmental, and genetic evidence into the historian’s archive. Her research explores relationships among political culture, environments, bodies, and changing practices of subsistence.

Higuchi studies the international history of the nuclear age, with particular attention to its scientific, technological, and environmental dimensions. He also writes about the environmental history of modern Japan in the Pacific world.

McKittrick is a historian of Southern Africa whose work examines the intersections of race, colonialism, and environment. Focusing especially on Namibia, she studies dryland environments, water resources, and environmental visions of social and political order.

McNeill is a Distinguished University Professor who teaches world, environmental, and international history. His wide-ranging scholarship has helped define global environmental history, from disease and empire to the environmental transformations of the twentieth century.

王悠 Wáng Yōu (she/they) is an economic and environmental historian of late imperial China. Her current research unravels the social and political entanglements of institutions, gender, and technology through water governance in the Lower Yangzi Delta. She also explores community-based solutions for environmental sustainability.

Barison is a medievalist whose work explores how conquest reshaped landscapes. His research combines historical sources with evidence from fields including palynology and isotope studies.

Ethan Barkalow joined the History PhD program in 2022. He is a 2025–26 Fulbright Japan Graduate Research Fellow at Kyoto University. His interests include the environmental history of modern Japan and Korea, with a focus on coastal areas and fisheries. His dissertation project investigates environmental and social changes in the coastal communities of imperial Japan and colonial Korea. His work highlights the interdependence between marine industries, labor, and fisheries science across the Japanese archipelago and Korean peninsula. Ethan’s interest in the marine environment began with summer visits to his family’s storied fishing shack-turned cottage on the shore of Little Peconic Bay in Long Island, NY. He further deepened his connection to the sea through work with the Maine Coastal Program. He earned his B.A. from Bowdoin College in 2018 with a major in History and Environmental Studies and a minor in Japanese. After living in Japan for two years teaching English at elementary schools, Ethan received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University in 2022.

Bestilleiro Lettini studies the dialogue among political, economic, and environmental history in the Río de la Plata. His dissertation traces the transformation of the Greater Pampas and its place in the Atlantic economy between 1770 and 1920.

Bisht examines societal and institutional responses to drought in central India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His work considers the experiences of agrarian communities alongside the policies of native and colonial rulers.

Céntola studies the long-distance circulation of natural resources in California from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His work connects commodity flows, ecological globalization, and the spread of disease.

Soham Dalui joined the doctoral program in History at Georgetown University in 2025. His research focuses on state formation, legal governance, ecological change, and discourses on disease in the eastern subcontinent between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. His current project examines the connections between the expansion of malarial disease and Mughal expansion in the Bengal delta. He is interested in the environment, particularly waterscapes and their associated ecologies, as sites of legal, political, and material tension during this period. He has also worked on the politico-legal culture of local elites in the frontier regions of the Mughal Empire, with particular attention to law, the production of historical memory, and questions of belonging. Before joining Georgetown, he received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Jadavpur University.

Esen studies the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea region through fish and fishing communities. Her research connects animal history, commodification, state formation, local practice, and climate.

Galesi works at the intersection of environmental and Atlantic history, studying how plants moved around the early modern world. She is especially interested in food plants and why the same crop acquires different cultural meanings in different places.

Leonard studies the religious and environmental history of the early modern Atlantic world. Her research focuses on encounters between evangelical Protestant communities and Indigenous peoples, including the role of climate and environment in syncretic thought.

Ross studies U.S. imperialism and statecraft in the twentieth century, with a focus on science and environmental change. His dissertation examines the U.S. missile range system as infrastructure for global power projection during the Cold War.

Salinas studies the environmental history of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War. His scholarship is informed by extensive military experience and by earlier teaching in military, European, international, and Russian history.

Singer studies the environmental and gender history of early medieval Europe, particularly post-Roman Britain and Merovingian Gaul. Her interdisciplinary work combines textual criticism with paleoscientific evidence to investigate plague, climate, and disaster.

Smith studies climate and environmental change in late antiquity, especially the movement of peoples around the Black Sea and Danube Basin. Their work combines historical texts, paleoclimate records, and bioarchaeological evidence.

My dissertation examines how contests over mountainous terrain, mobility, and property regimes across the Ottoman/Turkish eastern Anatolia and Russian/Soviet Transcaucasus borderland between 1870 and 1940 shaped both the everyday lives of local communities and broader processes of imperial and post-imperial transformation. Bringing together social and environmental history with scholarship on borderlands and fugitivity, it treats this region as a connected ecological space, linked by mountains, forests, seasonal labor routes, flight, fugitivity, and transhumant movement, rather than by the administrative boundaries imposed by states. Methodologically, I combine multilingual state and non-state archives with oral testimonies to reconstruct both the state-produced category of fugitive and the lived practices from below that evaded or subverted these categories. Before joining Georgetown, I worked as an indexer for Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection, which has shaped my methodological commitment to bringing state and non-state written sources into conversation with oral testimonies.