Dante LaRiccia

Dante LaRiccia is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale, where he studies the environmental history of the modern United States. He earned his MA in Global History from the Free University in Berlin, where he studied at a German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD) scholar, and his BA in History and Politics from New York University. 

 

Dante’s dissertation, Carbon Colonization: U.S. Empire in the Age of Oil, reexamines the overseas U.S. colonial project through the lens of energy history, and argues that colonial and carbon energy regimes are historically intertwined. The project explores how from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s, petroleum shaped processes of colonization and decolonization across the Caribbean and Pacific theaters of the U.S. empire. It reveals not only how colonial imperialism globalized patterns of carbon energy consumption and dependency, but also how colonial subjects variously challenged the relationship between carbon and colonialism through economic policy, protest, and anti-colonial environmental movements. Drawing together archival materials from the domestic United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawai’i, Guam, and the Philippines, Carbon Colonization illuminates the role of colonial imperialism in the making of the twentieth century Anthropocene. 

 

Dante’s scholarship has appeared in Diplomatic History and has been awarded an honorable mention for Modern American History’s Brook L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips Essay Prize. While at Yale, his research has been generously supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, where he served as an inaugural graduate student fellow in the environmental humanities, as well as International Security Studies, the MacMillan Center, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the John C. Enders Fellowship, the John Morton Blum Fellowship, the Department of History, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. 

 

Dante’s research and teaching interests include U.S. history; global and international history; environmental history; and energy history. He is eager to present these interests to a wide audience, and currently serves as a graduate Energy History Fellow working on digital and public history projects beyond the academy.