Charlotte Leib is a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Yale. She primarily researches, teaches, and writes about the cultures, technologies, political economies and climates that have shaped landscapes and cities in early America and in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. Her work also explores these phenomena in reverse: i.e. how environments have shaped patterns of thought, governance, energy use, and culture.
In her dissertation, she looks specifically at how landscape ideologies and technologies adopted during energy transitions intersected with and reinforced racial ideologies and normative attitudes about what was valuable, or had use value, in the lowland and upland meadow landscapes of New Jersey / Lenapehoking. Conceptualized as an environmental history of the New Jersey Meadowlands since the time of its colonization, the project moves between plant, place, and planet in its analytic modes to offer a new lens through which to understand histories of climate change, colonialism, energy use, urbanization, and capitalism.
In her other work, Charlotte has examined industrial corporations' historic involvement in defining how parks in the United States have been built and funded. She has a forthcoming article on that topic in the Journal of Energy History, titled "Provisioning Parks in Petrochemical America: Origins and Legacies of the Land and Water Conservation Fund," and a second related article, titled "Manufacturing Justice: A History of Parks Planning in New Jersey and the Quest for Justice in Newark’s 'Sacrifice Zone'" in the forthcoming edited volume New Jersey's Natures: Environmental Histories of the Garden State (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Her Petrocultures 2024: Los Angeles presentation, "Fixing Petrocapital: How Offshore Oil Money Has Shaped American Landscapes and Waterfronts," was recently featured in Artforum. In her second year in Yale's History Ph.D. program, she shared a video presentation on the designed landscapes of the Black Freedom movement in Watts, Los Angeles at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference.
At Yale, she has served as a Teaching Fellow for courses on American Architectural History, Urban History, Energy History, Climate & Environmental History, and the History of Science & Medicine. She holds Master's degrees in Landscape Architecture and Landscape History & Theory from Harvard University (2019), and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University (2013). A former Division I swimmer, she has worked previously as a landscape designer, swimming coach, street tree surveyor, writer, curator, and editor, among other side hustles.