Dr Brittany Meché
Environmental Humanities Fellow, January - April 2025
Home institution: Williams College
Brittany Meché is a transdisciplinary scholar working across the fields of Environmental Studies, African/Diaspora Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. Brittany earned her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the politics of environmental expertise, global security projects, French and United States empire, and the making of Black/African diasporic worlds. Brittany’s work has been featured in Transition, Antipode, Society and Space, ACME, Environment and Society, and in the edited volume A Research Agenda for Military Geographies. Brittany previously served as the McMillan-Stewart fellow at Harvard University. During her IASH fellowship, she will be working on her book manuscript titled Desert Black: Arid Lands and Imperial Democracy in the Transatlantic World.
Project title: Desert Black: Arid Lands and Imperial Democracy in the Transatlantic World
My project advances an interdisciplinary approach to global histories of arid environments. Focusing on the interrelations between the American Southwest and French-occupied West Africa, the book-length project examines the role of Black/African labor and transnational circulations of expert knowledge about deserts in imperial nation-building during the 19th and 20th centuries. I ask: how and why have deserts served as recurring sites of imperial competition and scientific exploration? What modes of governance emerge from and within arid ecologies? And, in the shadow of this imperial history, how can we retheorize arid ecologies as unique, dynamic sites of multivalent placemaking? To answer these questions, I draw from a range of fields, including historical geography, political theory, the history of science, Black and Indigenous studies, and political ecology. Though much has been written about the histories of environmental knowledge and state power, less attention has been paid to how arid landscapes, in particular, shaped the coterminous trajectories of French and American statehood in an age of empire. Ultimately, Desert Black seeks to theorize the imperial ecologies of arid landscapes, while also exploring how to cultivate alternate ecological futures in arid lands.