Charlotte Leib

Charlotte is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History and member of the Environmental Humanities and Environmental History cohorts. Initially trained as a landscape architect, she combines methods from the plant humanities, urban environmental history, discard studies, and the histories of science, technology and cultural landscapes in her work.

 

Prior to her doctoral studies, Charlotte received a BA in Architecture from Princeton University and dual Masters degrees in Landscape Architecture and Design Studies from Harvard University. At Harvard, her Master’s thesis examining the proto-ecological ambitions and pedagogic underpinnings of several modernist housing projects developed in the US during the 1940’s received the Best Paper on Housing Prize. At Yale, she has served as a Teaching Fellow for courses on urban history, environmental history, architectural history, energy history, and the history of science & technology. She completed comprehensive exams fields in US history, landscape history & theory, spatial history, and early American environmental history in February 2022, and completed the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities in December 2022. She currently serves on the Yale Environmental Humanities Steering Committee.

 

Her dissertation, titled, “Of Meadows and Meadowland Worlds: An Environmental History of the New Jersey Meadowlands,” examines the relationships forged between humans and meadows, and the landscape forms and forms of knowledge and governance that they together created across different energetic regimes, beginning with the pre-industrial organic economy. In the 2023-24 academic year, she is advancing the research, writing, and digital mapping components of the project with Fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the State of New Jersey Historical Commission, the Boston Public Library Leventhal Map & Education Center, and the Yale Club of Philadelphia.