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Heather Roller
Professor of History and Environmental Studies
(On leave in 2024-2025)
Heather Roller specializes in global environmental history and the Indigenous societies of Brazil and Amazonia.
Her first book, , was published in 2014 and received the Roberto Reis Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association and the Howard Cline Prize from the Conference on Latin American History. Drawing on local sources from across the Portuguese Amazon in the eighteenth century, the book traces how Indigenous villagers created an enduring culture of mobility along the waterways of this region.
In 2021, Dr. Roller published , which examines how independent Native groups initiated and controlled contact with Brazilian society over about two centuries. It won the Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association, the Howard Cline Prize from the Conference on Latin American History, and the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Book Prize from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Dr. Roller's current book project is Legacy Chemicals: A Half Century of Pesticides in American Farming and Rural Life. Combining oral history interviews with archival research, it explores how farmers and other people in rural communities have experienced the role of agricultural pesticides in their lives and landscapes (1970s - present).
BA, Yale University (2002)
MA, PhD, Stanford University (2005, 2010)
- Global environmental history
- Amazonia and Brazil
- Agricultural history
- Toxicity
- Indigenous histories
- Colonialism
Books
(Stanford University Press, 2021).
(Stanford University Press, 2014).
Selected Articles and Chapters
in The Interior: Rethinking Brazilian History from the Inside, ed. Jacob Blanc and Frederico Freitas (University of Texas Press, 2025).
in History Unclassified, American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020): 1740-1750.
in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Ethnohistory 65, no. 4 (2018): 647-670.
Colonial Latin American Review 21, no. 1 (2012): 101-126.
The Americas 66:4 (April 2010), 435-467.
[Em português: Revista de História 168 (July 2013), 201-243.]
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2024-2025)
- Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History (2023)
- Friedrich Katz Prize, American Historical Association (2022)
- Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize, Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association (2022)
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2017-2018)
- Roberto Reis Book Prize, Brazilian Studies Association (2015)
- Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History (2015)
- American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2013-2014)
- Warren Dean Prize, honorable mention, Conference on Latin American History (2011)
- Tibesar Prize, Conference on Latin American History (2010)
- Helen Hornbeck Tanner Award, American Society for Ethnohistory (2009)
- Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Fellowship for Brazil (2006-2007)
- CORE 193: Brazil
- HIST 224: Introduction to Environmental History
- HIST 288: Animals in History
- HIST 302: Global Toxic History
- HIST 400: Secrets and Lies in History
- Chair/Secretary of the Brazilian Studies Committee, Conference on Latin American History (2019-2021)
- Member of the Editorial Board, Ethnohistory (2018-present)
- Councillor, American Society for Ethnohistory (2018-2020)