Elizabeth Hennessy is an Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies within the Department of History. She is a geographer who works at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology, science and technology studies, and multispecies studies with a regional focus on Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden was published in 2019 and longlisted for a 2020 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The book draws on ethnographic and archival research to trace a transnational history of the iconic Galápagos giant tortoises as animals at the center of tensions among evolutionary science, conservation, and tourism development in the archipelago.
Her current research focuses on the palm oil industry in Ecuador, particularly how a bud rot disease is reconfiguring local economies, and with them the racial and class politics of agrarian land tenure.
A word from Leonora Neville, Chair of the History Department:
Liz Hennessy has held a joint appointment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of History since 2014. Hennessy’s first book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden, (Yale 2019) intertwines environmental history, history of science, geography, political economy, and conservation studies to show how evolutionary understandings of human life have changed, and the ways these understandings continue to inform human relationships with nature. By narrating changing human relationships with the giant tortoises and the Galápagos Islands they inhabit, she explores global processes of scientific knowledge production, political economic development, and ecological change. Her beautifully-written book was a finalist for the 2020 E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, sponsored by PEN America Literary Awards. Hennessy has been active as a campus leader in developing an interdisciplinary workshop on Environmental Justice in Multi-Species Worlds, receiving funding from the Holtz Center for Science and Technology and twice from the Center for the Humanities for Borghesi-Mellon workshops to support developing a cross-discipline network on campus that has been pursuing multi-species studies, political ecology, and post-human ethics. The History Department is overjoyed to have Professor Hennessy on our faculty.