Heather Roller
(On leave in 2024-2025)
Heather Roller specializes in global environmental history, Brazil and Amazonia, and the histories of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
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 Legacy Chemicals: A Half Century of Pesticides in Family Farming and Rural Life. It explores how farmers and other people in rural communities have experienced the role of agricultural pesticides in their lives and landscapes, from the 1970s to the present.