Fellows 2021-2022

Catherine (Catie) Peters (American Studies, Havard University)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow

Catherine (Catie) Peters is a Postdoctoral Associate in Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies from Harvard University. Catie is an interdisciplinary historian whose work is concerned with empire, race, gender, sexuality, intimacy, capitalism, and the environment. Her book project, A Free Race of Cultivators: Afro-Asian Histories, Ecologies, and Intimacies, draws together the Indian and Atlantic Oceans while also arguing for the Haitian Revolution as a catalyst in the conscription of Chinese and Indian migrants to the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. Writing against traditional historical frames, which naturalize the “replacement” of indentured individuals for enslaved people, the study situates people of Asian and African descent within the same historical frame to demonstrate how imperial projects joined their histories together. As a dissertation, the project drew upon over fifteen months of archival work in the United Kingdom, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Spain, France, and the United States. Catie has a forthcoming essay on “intimacies as method” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published in the pages of Environmental History, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Her work has been supported by many fellowships, including the John Carter Brown Library, American Antiquarian Society, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and numerous centers at Harvard University. While at Yale, Catie will continue work on a project that links the development of sustainable agriculture via empire in Asia and settler colonialism in the United States.

Esteban Salas (History, University of Notre Dame)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow

Esteban Salas received his PhD in African history from the University of Notre Dame in 2021. He holds a bachelor degree in history from the Universidad de Costa Rica. He also attended the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and the Beijing Language and Culture University, Pekin, China, for training in cultural studies and languages. Esteban worked as a research assistant for the UNESCO “Del Olvido a la Memoria” project, on dissemination of African and Afro-Latin American history in Central America. He also collaborated with the project on the cataloguing of nineteenth century court files in Benguela, Angola, coordinated by the Universidade Katyavala Bwila, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, and the University of Notre Dame. Esteban’s research centers on the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on societies in West Central Africa. His current work focuses on themes of slavery, labor, racial thinking, and early colonialism in Angola. He has done archival research in Angola and Portugal with support from the Luso-American Foundation, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. His publications include contributions on the edited volume African Women in the Atlantic World, Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660-1880 by Mariana Candido and Adam Jones and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History by Martin Klein.

Patricio Dellagiovanna is an International Relations professional and academic, specialized in sustainable green development and international parliamentary cooperation. He holds a Master’s degree in International Relations of Europe and Latin America from the University of Bologna, where he was a fellow and resident researcher. He is also a PhD candidate in Medieval, Modern, Contemporary and American History at the University of Salamanca.