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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, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil, 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 Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil, 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 a narrative history of chemical dependency in agriculture, entitled Legacy Chemicals: A Half Century of Pesticides in American Farming and Rural Life. It combines oral history interviews with archival research to explore how farmers, their families, and other rural residents 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
Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2021).
Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Selected Articles and Chapters
"Indigenous Spies and Surveillance in Late Colonial Brazil," in The Interior: Rethinking Brazilian History from the Inside, ed. Jacob Blanc and Frederico Freitas (University of Texas Press, 2025).
"A Shared Toxic History," in History Unclassified, American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020): 1740-1750.
"Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil," in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (Oxford University Press, 2019).
“On the Verge of Total Extinction? From Guaikurú to Kadiwéu in Nineteenth-Century Brazil," Ethnohistory 65, no. 4 (2018): 647-670.
“River Guides, Geographical Informants, and Colonial Field Agents in the Portuguese Amazon,” Colonial Latin American Review 21, no. 1 (2012): 101-126.
“Colonial Collecting Expeditions and the Pursuit of Opportunities in the Amazonian Sertão, c. 1750-1800,” The Americas 66:4 (April 2010), 435-467.
[Em português: “Expedições coloniais de coleta e a busca por oportunidades no sertão amazônico, c. 1750-1800,” 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)
- HIST 224: Introduction to Environmental History
- HIST 288: Animals in History
- HIST 302: Global Toxic History
- HIST 400: Secrets and Lies in History
- CORE 193: Brazil