I'm Charlotte Leib, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. Trained in US and early American environmental history, energy history, and landscape history, I am a historian and educator with twelve years of combined experience in the fields of landscape architecture, history, design, and education.

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I primarily research and write about the cultures, technologies, and political economies and climates that have shaped landscapes and cities in early America and in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. I also explore these phenomena in reverse: i.e. how environments have shaped patterns of thought, governance, energy use, and culture. My work at this nexus is informed by my initial training in the design fields, by my current doctoral studies, and in the case of my dissertation, by my upbringing in a State situated within the enduring ancestral homelands of Lenape peoples.

 

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My dissertation examines how meadow plants, technologies, and ideologies shaped larger patterns of colonization, climate change, and urbanization along the Northeastern Atlantic seaboard during the transition from the organic to fossil economies, using the Meadowlands of New Jersey / Lenapehoking as a central case study.

 

The first half of the project centers coastal meadows, and the Meadowlands in particular, as understudied spaces of climate adaptation, Munsee-Lenape power, and energy supply in Dutch and British colonial America. In this part's concluding chapter, I situate the American Revolution as a pivotal climatic and energy event in the course of American and global history by reevaluating the energetic and ideological importance of meadows, and the Meadowlands specifically, in the conflict.​

 

The second half of the project traces the transformation of meadow spaces, values, and technologies as the American economy began to be reoriented around further dispossession of Indigenous lands and the extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels after the Revolution, and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

Drawing upon the abundance of new methods and scholarship in climate and environmental history, the dissertation stitches environmental and climatic phenomena back into existing interpretations of key events in American history that transpired in Meadowlands and that came to affect sites farther afield.​ By using interdisciplinary methods to highlight understudied relationships between patterns of colonization, meadow manipulation, imperial expansion, climate change, and urbanization, my dissertation offers a more complete assessment of the intellectual currents, technologies, and power struggles that transformed the landscape of the Northeastern Atlantic coast, and the Meadowlands in particular, from the early colonial period to present.

 

The project also provides the first comprehensive place-based study of the development of the organic economy in the early American period, and the material and ideological consequences of its development as it intersected with an ascendant fossil economy. Moving between plant, place and planet in its analytic modes, it seeks to make contributions to the fields of early American history, US history, energy history, and environmental history.

 

Because shifting material cultures of meadow use and transformation in the early American and US contexts also intersect with histories of science, technology, and imperialism, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the history of slavery in the Americas, and economic history and climate history, each chapter draws upon literature from these fields. I hope the project will contribute something back to each of them once it is complete.

 

The heterogeneity of methodological approaches used in my dissertation stems from my initial training in landscape history, and my commitment to researching and writing about landscapes in ways that recognize the materiality and layered complexity of the histories we live with (and for). Living with the outcomes and ongoing path-dependencies of these histories—with an ethos of reciprocity and care; and with a sense of time, place, plant, and planet that goes beyond the ticking clock and the carbon sink—is, to my mind, the riddle of our settler colonial present.​

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Prior to beginning doctoral studies in History, I completed Masters degrees at Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at Princeton University. I also worked for various design offices, nonprofits and municipalities, including: SCAPE Landscape Architecture in New York City; Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield, Vermont; the Urban Farming Institute of Boston; and the City of Cambridge Department of Public Works, Urban Forestry Division.

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While completing my Master in Design Studies and Master in Landscape Architecture degrees at Harvard, I contributed to the research, public programming and design of several exhibitions on landscape-related topics, including ‘The Bauhaus and Harvard’ at the Harvard Art Museums (Feb. 8–Jul. 28, 2019) and ‘Hudson Rising’ at the New-York Historical Society (Mar. 1–Aug. 4, 2019). At Harvard, my 2019 MDes. Thesis received the Best Paper on Housing Prize from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

 

In past semesters I served on the Yale Environmental Humanities Steering Committee and I helped to coordinate the Yale Environmental History working group.​

 

During the third and fourth years of my Ph.D. (Fall 2021 through Fall 2023) I also worked part-time as a Designer at the landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand. While working at the firm, I co-organized a deep dive session at the American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Conference focused on the challenges of mitigating the impacts of plastic and water waste in designed landscapes.

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In the 2023-24 academic year, my dissertation was supported by Fellowships from the American Philosophical Society Center for Digital Scholarship, the John Carter Brown Library, the State of New Jersey Historical Commission, the Yale Club of Philadelphia, and the Boston Public Library Leventhal Map & Education Center.

 

Last semester, I participated in weekly workshops exploring theory and praxis in anti-racist pedagogy as a Teaching Race Graduate Fellow. The Teaching Race Fellowship Cohort is assembled through the Yale Center for the Study for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration and is sponsored by the Mellon Centering Race Consortium.

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I have presented my work at numerous conferences in the US and internationally, and I have forthcoming articles in the Journal of Energy History, Landscape Research, and a chapter in the edited volume New Jersey's Natures: Environmental Histories of the Garden State (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

 

These engagements and others are listed on my CV.

 

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Thank you for stopping by, I appreciate your interest in my work.

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