Samantha Iyer
Assistant Professor, History Department, Arts and Sciences
Areas of Research:
Modern United States, Modern Middle East, Modern South Asia, Political Economy, Environmental History, Agrarian History.
Dr. Samantha Iyer is a historian of international political economy and political ecology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and her work focuses on the United States, the Middle East, and South Asia. Her forthcoming book, Agrarian Superpower, examines through the prism of food and agriculture how the United States emerged as a global power by the mid-twentieth century out of an era of British imperial dominance. In addition to the United States, it focuses on Egypt and India, two British colonies that became among the largest importers of U.S. food aid after their independence. Her next project is a history of black rats. It examines how these mammals navigated the infrastructures, social structures, and patterns of trade that developed in the U.S. and British empires in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Iyer’s writing has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Past and Present, and Spectre.