Dante LaRiccia

Dante’s research focuses on the environmental, social, and economic implications of fossil fuels during the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the centrality of oil within systems of racial capitalism, colonial political economy, and (post)colonial development. His tentative dissertation reexamines the relationships between energy and the US empire by investigating how fossil fuels–oil in particular–underwrote major shifts in the racial, environmental, and economic orders of the post-1898 colonial project. 

 

Prior to Yale, Dante received an M.A. in Global History from the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he studied on a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship. There, he graduated with highest marks and completed a thesis on the 1970s energy crisis and the shifting global terrain of multilateral economic development. Before that, Dante received a B.A. in History and Politics from New York University, where he graduated cum laude and won highest honors for a thesis on architectures of migratory labor mobility within the West German guest worker program. 

 

While at Yale, Dante’s research has been generously supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, where he served as one of the inaugural graduate student fellows in the environmental humanities in 2021-22, as well as the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the John C. Enders Fellowship, and the Department of History. He maintains broad interests in the environmental humanities, global and transnational history, and histories of colonialism and empire.