Charlotte Leib

I'm Charlotte Leib, a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Yale University.

My dissertation offers the first place-based history of the material and ideological consequences of the middle-Atlantic organic economy's development as it intersected with an ascendant fossil economy in eighteenth-century colonial America, and later, in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States.

At base, the project is a study of the New Jersey Meadowlands and the larger landscapes it participated in and helped to produce. By focusing upon the myriad ways in which the site has been manipulated and reinvented during times of crisis, scarcity, and war, and analyzing the far-reaching consequences of the landscape ideologies and technologies adopted during those transformations, the project offers new perspectives and methods through which to understand histories of climate change, colonialism, energy use, environmental inequality, biodiversity loss, urbanization, and capitalism.

I recently was awarded a prize from the Urban History Association for my essay "Healing Wounds of Light: Birds, Cities and the Fast, Slow, and Forgotten Violence of Artificial Illumination." It examines how birds, cities, and humans have been affected by different urban lighting technologies over the centuries. It also seeks to encourage historians and readers to move beyond celebrations of urban lighting systems’ brilliance, to recognize and mediate the extents of these systems' historical and ongoing brutalities. Judges recognized the essay as “ambitious, compelling” and “a galvanizing call to action in the present.”

I hold a Master in Landscape Architecture and Master in Design Studies, with distinction, from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University with certificates in Urban Studies and American Studies. In past years, I have worked on a variety of architecture, landscape architecture, research, exhibition, and planning projects at design firms such as SCAPE in New York City, Reed Hilderbrand in New Haven and Cambridge, and OMA/AMO in the Netherlands. Early in my career I worked for a range of non-profits and municipalities, including the Urban Farming Institute of Boston, the City of Cambridge Department of Public Works, Urban Forestry Division, The Swimming Hole in Stowe, Vermont, and Yestermorrow Design/Build School.

In 2024, the Journal of Energy History published my peer-reviewed article "Provisioning Parks in Petrochemical America: Origins and Legacies of the Land and Water Conservation Fund" in a special issue on environmental histories of the oil industry.

The article received the 2026 Alice Hamilton Prize from the American Society for Environmental History.

The article revises existing celebratory accounts of 1960s US conservation policy by showing how the attachment of federal offshore oil and gas revenues to national and state park funding models in that decade primarily serviced the needs of the oil and gas industry, while advancing covertly eugenic priorities.

In May 2026, Rutgers University Press will publish my peer-reviewed contribution to New Jersey’s Natures: Environmental Histories of the Garden State, edited by Raechel Lutz. In this piece, titled, "Parks, Planning, and the Quest for Justice in Newark's 'Sacrifice Zone,'" I clarify the competing ways in which industrial and racialized aims and environmental justice counter-movements shaped New Jersey planning practices and historic attempts to build parks along the Lower Passaic River from the 1890s into the 2020s.

The chapter was recently awarded the Society of Architectural Historians 2026 Landscape History Chapter Essay Prize.

I developed the above two peer-reviewed publications separately from my dissertation project over the course of my Ph.D. They provide a basis for my next book project: a history of how American parks planning practices were shaped by distinct political economies of energy production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I will continue my research for this project this summer 2026 with the support of a John Nolen Research Grant from the Cornell University Manuscripts & Archives.

In addition to my peer-reviewed history scholarship, public history and digital humanities work are important aspects of my research and writing agenda.

I am currently a contributor to Our Land, Our Stories, a multimedia project dedicated to sharing Native history and advancing environmental justice advocacy in New Jersey, developed in collaboration with the Ramapough Lunaape Nation.

My recent contribution to the project uses maps, herbaria specimens, treaty documents, and archival research to clarify a key condition that has been, for too long, left out of histories of colonial America: the fact that a large portion of the New Jersey Meadowlands once served as a crucial wild rice harvesting grounds for Lenape peoples.

The digital map-story I developed for Our Land, Our Stories is part of a larger series, in-development, titled "Plants and Munsee Lenape Lifeways in the New Jersey Meadowlands." This series stems from my dissertation research and work I began as a 2023-2024 Fellow at the American Philosophical Society's Center for Digital Scholarship.

In 2025, my illustrated essay "Engineering Nature, Igniting Risk: LA's Fires and a Century of Landscape Manipulation", was shared widely online.

The essay clarifies how a century of hydrological manipulation, road-building, and engineered desiccation contributed to the 2025 LA Fires. It was one of the Urban History Association's top-three most read blog entries of 2025.

I have served as a Teaching Fellow at Yale across six semesters (2021-2023; 2024-2025).

In Spring 2025, I was a Teaching Fellow for the history of science lecture course Botanical Bodies: Plants, Medicine & Colonial Science at Yale. In Fall 2024, I was a Teaching Fellow for the lecture course Climate & Environment in American History.

In the 2024-25 academic year, I was a Teaching Race Graduate Fellow at Yale's Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

I am currently a research assistant for the New Haven Environmental History project.

You can explore the tabs above for my recent talks, upcoming events, and publications. My full CV is available here. Welcome!