Ten Ph.D. students from across the humanities joined Yale this fall as the fourth cohort of Whitney Humanities Center Graduate Fellows in the Environmental Humanities. The fellowship began in 2021 when the Whitney Humanities Center and Yale Environmental Humanities partnered to launch a new fellowship for first-year Ph.D. students in the humanities. The fellows are all conducting work that engages with environmental questions and topics. The fellowship comes with an honorarium, opportunities for mentorship, and special programming designed to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration and community. Please join us in congratulating the recipients and read more about their work below!
Ana Cristina Betancourt is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale. She recently finished a two-year post-baccalaureate program at Yale, where she cemented her interests in the field of history of science, and more specifically the history of plant collecting in the Hispanic Caribbean region. This program allowed her to co-curate an ongoing exhibit at Yale’s Peabody Museum called “Fakes and Fictions: Unraveling Museum Narratives.” Before starting her post-bacc, she graduated with a B.S. in Integrative Biology from the University of Puerto Rico in 2021. During her undergraduate studies, she frequently collaborated with the on-campus herbarium and museum in different capacities. She’s eager to keep collaborating with museums and use collections in her research.
Yohely Comprés is a doctoral student in the combined program in African American Studies and Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 2024 with departmental honors in African American Studies and Latin American Studies, with support from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Her honors thesis examined allegorical and discursive representations of the ocean in Afro-Dominican literature and Black critical theory. At Yale, she hopes to continue engaging with the oceanic (im)possibilities of Black life-world-making in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Yohely was named an Environmental Humanities Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center and a Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration in 2024–2025.
Maïa Tellit Hawad holds an M.A. in Contemporary Philosophy from Panthéon-Sorbonne Université (Paris 1). Her previous research explored the imaginaries of the Sahara in environmental and political philosophy as well as French Africanist sciences. Her current work, which interrogates the intersection of race, geography, and mining extractivist logics within the current administration of the Sahara, focuses on nomadic becomings in contemporary Tuareg societies. Since 2023, she has been part of the teaching team for Research Studio RS6 in the Environmental Architecture program at the Royal College of Art in London.
Emily Hyatt is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of the History of Art. Her research engages with histories of materials in Italy and the German-speaking world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, particularly how practices of material extraction, circulation, reuse, and decay were entangled with early modern knowledge production and ways of making. By considering links between manufactured objects and representations of processes such as woodfelling, papermaking, and mining, she aims to understand how shifting notions of environment shaped visual and material culture. Hyatt’s current project analyzes the emergence and spread of papier-mâché/cartapesta to question how this ephemeral modeling medium participated in artistic and scientific regimes in early modern Europe. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Visual Art from Columbia University and an M.A. in Transcultural Studies from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany, where her thesis traced uses of silica pebbles and saltwort plants in Venetian glassmaking.
Heidi Katter is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her research examines how federal territorial surveillance in the Great Lakes region fueled treaty- and policymaking with Indigenous peoples. She blends spatial history and Native American history to illuminate how federal agents coopted Indigenous knowledge to determine the extractive and settler colonial value of Native lands. In so doing, she investigates how the U.S. government’s approach to Indigenous dispossession facilitated natural resource extraction and transformed the landscape of the American West. Heidi received her B.A. in History from Yale and her M.Phil. in American History from the University of Cambridge.
Nicola Mazzotti joined Yale’s German department as a graduate student in 2024. He was initially trained in German and English literatures at the Università degli Studi di Trieste and Freie Universität Berlin (B.A. 2020). Subsequently, he studied comparative literature at Dartmouth College (M.A. 2023) and FU Berlin (M.A. 2024). In his recent research, he examined how certain literary texts reveal complex layers of time sedimented in murky landscapes, where the human and the non-human are inextricably intertwined. Nicola now intends to pursue further research on the relationship between humanity and the landscape, especially in the German-speaking world. Specifically, he aims to investigate how the agency of the soil, as a political and aesthetic metaphor, formed new discourses in Germany after 1945, following the demise of the NSDAP and its racist agrarian ideology of Blood and Soil.
Hannah Piette is a first year Ph.D. student in the English department. She received her B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, and her thesis explored how John Clare’s poems respond to the enclosure of his parish. She graduated with an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and last year she taught poetry writing as the CLAS Visiting Poet in the English department at the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Works & Days, The Spectacle, Guesthouse, and elsewhere. At Yale, she is studying Romantic poetry and its relationship to the enclosure of the commons, as well as social histories of dispossession.
Oliver Riskin-Kutz is a first-year Ph.D. student in history. He is interested in the ways people live with the other animals, plants, water, and weather around them, and in particular in how these dynamics shaped, and were shaped by, colonial and imperial regimes. Before Yale, Oliver studied history (with a secondary degree in biology) at Harvard. His undergraduate thesis was on the environmental history of colonial Louisiana in the eighteenth century and looked at the ways French and Spanish projects of extraction confronted the realities of the people – Indigenous, enslaved, settlers, and officials – who lived in floodplains and along bayous with bears, cypress, alligators, indigo plants, and feral cattle.
Nuria Sánchez (she/her) is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where she will specialize in the field of ecocriticism and industrial studies on literary and visual arts. Sánchez is particularly interested in unearthing how culture acts as critic or ally of labor and state politics, especially in genres such as speculative fiction, science fiction, and horror. She seeks to cross-pollinate disciplines, such as gender, decoloniality, disability and border studies, along with conceptual history and post-growth economy.
Born in Mexico City, Sánchez received her B.A. from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she majored in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. She also has an M.A. in Art Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana, and earned Highest Honors for her thesis, an exploration of the relationship between literature, intermediality, and degrowth aesthetics. At Yale, she is also a RITM Graduate Fellow and a Fulbright Foreign Student.
Madelyn Scarlett is a doctoral student in the Slavic Languages and Literatures program and holds a B.S. in Russian from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in Russian from the University of Colorado. Her master’s thesis explored conceptions of the oil industry and national identity in diaries and journalism from the period of the Chechen Wars. During her doctoral research she plans to continue engaging with documentary media from the periphery of the former Soviet empire, considering how narratives of energy infrastructures and extractive economies are integrated into decolonial political and cultural movements.