Vera S. Candiani, Princeton University
Associate Professor
Princeton, New Jersey
candiani@princeton.edu
Office:
(609) 258-7089
Bio/Research
A native of Argentina, I studied at the University of California at Berkeley with Tulio Halperin Donghi, Margaret Chowning, Jan de Vries and Carla Hesse. I work in the region where social, economic and environmental history intersect with the history of technology. Although my area of specializat...
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Bio/Research
A native of Argentina, I studied at the University of California at Berkeley with Tulio Halperin Donghi, Margaret Chowning, Jan de Vries and Carla Hesse. I work in the region where social, economic and environmental history intersect with the history of technology. Although my area of specialization is Colonial Latin America, most of the questions I ask force me to think and write comparatively, and to delve into the role of human interactions with the material world of dirt, plants, animals and energy through work and everyday objects in broad historical processes.
In my view, history has the potential to better inform our decisions about the present and future, at the very least providing living experiments about the prospects for policies and projects of all sorts that few if any impact reports or predictions based on the study of current behaviors can match. But this potential is largely being wasted, putting the practice and teaching of history at risk of being seen as increasingly irrelevant to the urgent civilizational problems posed by environmental and social crises brewing all over the planet. In research and teaching I try to remedy this.
In addition to History, I am also affiliated with the Princeton-Mellon Urban Studies Program, the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Program of Latin American Studies.
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In my view, history has the potential to better inform our decisions about the present and future, at the very least providing living experiments about the prospects for policies and projects of all sorts that few if any impact reports or predictions based on the study of current behaviors can match. But this potential is largely being wasted, putting the practice and teaching of history at risk of being seen as increasingly irrelevant to the urgent civilizational problems posed by environmental and social crises brewing all over the planet. In research and teaching I try to remedy this.
In addition to History, I am also affiliated with the Princeton-Mellon Urban Studies Program, the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Program of Latin American Studies.
Click to Shrink <<