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Heather Roller
Professor of History and Environmental Studies
(On leave in 2024-2025)
Heather Roller specializes in global environmental history, Brazil and Amazonia, and the histories of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
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 S茅rgio Buarque de Holanda Book Prize from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Dr. Roller's current book project is A Social and Environmental History of Agrichemicals. It explores how people in rural communities have experienced and perceived the role of agricultural pesticides in their lives and landscapes, from the 1970s to the present. What stories have they told about agrichemical practices and the ecological worlds shaped by these substances? Although focused (for now) on the United States, the project comes out of years of seeking to understand social and environmental transformations in Brazil, another country where pesticide use has become deeply embedded in rural life.
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 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 portugu锚s: Revista de Hist贸ria 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)
- S茅rgio 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)