Oliver Riskin-Kutz

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.