
Heather Roller
Heather Roller teaches courses on global environmental history, Brazil and Amazonia, and the histories of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
She is the author of Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2014), which received awards from the Brazilian Studies Association and 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.
Her second book, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2021) 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 and the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Book Prize from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
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 agrichemicals 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 agrichemical use has become deeply embedded in rural life.