About
Megan Raby is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of science and environment whose work emphasizes the transnational connections of science in the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century. Her scholarship explores the intersections of scientific practice and geopolitical dynamics, particularly focusing on the Caribbean region's role in shaping biodiversity science. Raby's book, American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017, investigates the relationship between the history of field ecology, the expansion of U.S. hegemony in the circum-Caribbean during the twentieth century, and the emergence of the modern concept of biodiversity. This work was recognized with the 2019 Philip J. Pauly Prize awarded by the History of Science Society. In addition to her book, Megan Raby has authored articles published in prominent journals such as Environmental History and Isis. Her article in Isis received the History of Science Society's 2016 Price/Webster Award for best article. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to her appointment at the University of Texas at Austin, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the National Museum of American History. Her research and teaching contribute to a deeper understanding of global environmental history and the historical development of biodiversity science within a transnational context.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Library science
- Humanities
- Media studies
- Agroforestry
- Business
- Anthropology
- History
- Economics
- Ancient history
- Marketing
- Biology
- Geography
- Agronomy
- Economy
- Law
- Archaeology
- Art
- World Wide Web
- Agricultural economics
- Classics
- Art history
Selected publications
Agricultural History · 2023 · 3 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Geography
Abstract From 1926 to 1974, the United Fruit Company operated the Lancetilla Experiment Station near Tela, Honduras. As a laboratory and botanical garden where one of the world's largest living collections of tropical fruits could be found, it stood in apparent contrast to the vast banana monocultures of the surrounding area. While United Fruit's infamous plantations depended on the application of pesticides and chemical knowledge to produce a single commodity crop, its Lancetilla Experiment Station pursued a broad research program oriented toward agricultural diversification. This essay examines the history of Lancetilla to explore the company's sponsorship of science and the multiple, shifting meanings of “diversification” within this prototypical transnational agribusiness. The history of experimentation at Lancetilla reveals a range of contested visions of economic development in twentieth-century Latin America, and it is a history that has left surprising traces in both local Honduran landscapes and the face of global agribusiness today. Ultimately, by introducing oil palm to Central America, United Fruit's crop diversification project served to replace one monoculture with another.
Teaching Global Environmental History
2021-09-22
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAmerican Journal of Occupational Therapy · 2021-08-01
articleAbstract Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations. Social skills problems are main features of autism. The Over-Pruning Hypothesis suggests that such problems may be due to over-pruning of neural areas important to social skills. Intervention for social skills before age 5 years may strengthen connections, reducing pruning. Process drama may be a particularly effective way to practice social skills. This poster will describe the feasibility of an interdisciplinary (drama, OT, speech-language pathology) process drama program for social skills in preschoolers with autism. Primary Author and Speaker: Lorie Richards Additional Authors and Speakers: Heidi Woolley Contributing Authors: Xan S. Johnson, Pamela Mathy, Stacy Manwaring, Megan Raby, Wendy Wilde, Lise Thornton, and Penelope Caywood
Science, the United States, and Latin America
2021-05-10 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis essay explores the historiography of US–Latin American scientific relations, emphasising its contributions to theorising power dynamics in scientific practice and the production of knowledge. This literature has long been divided into two distinct strands: one focusing on US science and empire and the other on the development of national scientific communities in Latin America. While both emerged in conversation with mid-twentieth-century models of scientific diffusion, they have each developed with their own particular preoccupations. The former has emphasised how imperial expansion shaped US scientific institutions and culture, while the latter has focused on questions of science, economic development, and dependency. Since the 2000s, more space for cross-fertilisation between scholarship based in Latin American countries and the United States has opened up, particularly as work became increasingly multi-archival and transnational. Historians have begun to recognise how US–Latin American encounters shaped participants and ideas on all sides. New approaches to the history of US–Latin American scientific relations are emerging that recognise the complex dynamics of power and knowledge across a range of colonial and postcolonial contexts.
IHS Roundtable: “Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities”
2021-04-15
articleOpen accessSenior authorIsis · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Humanities
- Media studies
Isis · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Library science
Reviews in American History · 2019-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingScience in the Borderlands Megan Raby (bio) Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xiv + 357 pp. Figures, maps, footnotes, and index. $39.95. The history of science in early America was once a story of the genteel scientific circles of Eastern cities like Philadelphia and Boston. It centered on natural philosophers, tradesmen and statesmen like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and the origins of urban institutions like the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was about how––in fits and starts––the foundations of a national scientific culture were built through the efforts of a nascent community of colonial men of science. Ultimately, historians were concerned with elucidating the origins of what made "American science" unique––a historiographic focus that owed much to its development during the Cold War. This framing put a spotlight on Anglo-American relations, as exemplified by classic works by I. Bernard Cohen, Brooke Hindle, Raymond P. Stearns, and John C. Greene. How had Americans gone from colonial junior partners in the scientific enterprise to world scientific leaders in their own right? How had American science achieved its intellectual and institutional independence? Not surprisingly, democracy played a central role in this literature, with the democratic values of the early republic fostering the formation of scientific institutions while also manifesting in an emphasis on utility and a skepticism toward the authority of experts. The struggle for patronage was also a major theme. Scholars like A. Hunter Dupree and William Goetzmann showed how naturalists and geologists vied patriotically for state support. Science at last found a place in the federal budget as the United States itself became an empire that sought to understand and rule an expanding western territory. At a time when the field of the history of science generally remained centered on Europe and dominated by the history of ideas, the emergence of interest in the social and cultural context of science in colonial America and the United States was a refreshing development. Since the 2000s, authors like Joyce Chaplin and Susan Scott Parrish have deepened and complicated our [End Page 168] understanding of the cultures and range of participants––including Native Americans, women, and enslaved people of African descent––involved in the creation and circulation of knowledge about the natural world and human bodies in early America. Andrew Lewis and others have also emphasized the dependence of urban natural historians on networks of non-elite observers and collectors in the hinterlands. Nevertheless, even as the purview of this field broadened, it largely remained oriented toward the East Coast and the British Atlantic world. Cameron Strang takes this longstanding historiography in quite literally a new direction with Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. Strang leaves behind the tiny, elite world of what he vividly describes as "North America's eastern Anglo fringe" (p. 6). We journey instead into a vast territory of battlegrounds, Indian villages, and plantations across the southeast borderlands, stretching from Florida to Texas. More than simply a change of venue, this regional reframing opens up a whole new world of questions and a new way of looking at what is "American" about American science. Where an older tradition located its essence in a national culture of democracy, liberty, and patriotism, Strang unearths enduring legacies of imperialism, slavery, and violence amid a patchwork of shifting allegiances. Between the 1500s and mid-1800s, the Gulf South was a region of competing empires and unstable power dynamics, a true borderland where diverse peoples met and no single empire was able to hold complete sway. Such a context offered myriad opportunities for individuals who could stake a claim to specialized knowledge about the lands, resources, and peoples of this contested territory. Thus we encounter a wide range of historical actors who rarely feature in more traditional histories of science––perhaps especially not histories of science in America. We meet slaves, slaveowners, spies, herbalists, and shamans. We meet men like Lamhatty, a Tawasa Indian enslaved...
The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps
2019-02-13
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina
Hispanic American Historical Review · 2019-07-29
article1st authorCorrespondingStuart Schwartz makes his first major foray into environmental history with this 500-year study of Caribbean hurricanes. The results are impressive. Sea of Storms stands as a prime example of the power of an environmental approach to cast new light on long-standing historiographies. As much a social and cultural history as a history of storms, the swirling winds of the hurricane provide the centripetal force necessary for a unified narrative of this complex and varied region.Schwartz is not the first to place hurricanes at the heart of historical analysis. He builds on Louis Pérez's pioneering Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (2001) and subsequent efforts focused on the colonial-era British Caribbean (by Matthew Mulcahy) and Spanish Caribbean (by Sherry Johnson). Through meticulous multilingual primary research and synthesis, however, Schwartz offers a truly transnational and comparative account. Sea of Storms thus self-consciously follows in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, not only in its expansive temporal and geographic proportions but also by drawing on a characteristic environmental feature to bring regional unity to a study of diverse societies. In this way, hurricanes join and illuminate histories of colonization, plantation slavery, and migration as a defining factor in Caribbean history.Although broadly chronological, the nine chapters focus on themes that intersect and recur, building a portrait of change and continuity in how Caribbean societies have understood and responded to disaster. Among the most important of these themes are changing cultural and scientific conceptions of hurricane causation. Indeed, Schwartz's attentiveness to knowledge in the making sets his book apart from the most comparable regional environmental history, John McNeill's Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (2010). Schwartz's first chapter explores how indigenous people and colonizers alike understood hurricanes as a supernatural force. Violent storms were sometimes seen as divine punishment for human sins. Drawing on local empirical observations and Taíno and Carib knowledge, early Spanish settlers also learned to interpret “signs” of a hurricane's approach. Later chapters revisit this theme, as an emerging science of weather and climate gradually recast hurricanes as physical phenomena governed by natural laws. The growth of communication networks and an international community of meteorologists in the nineteenth century promised to make possible the prediction and mitigation of this “act of God.” Yet with the rise of anthropogenic global warming, the idea of hurricanes as retribution for human actions has made an unexpected comeback.Changing expectations about the responsibilities of the state is also a significant thread across chapters. Disaster relief and recovery was largely the responsibility of affected communities and charities until the mid-eighteenth century. Only as sugar plantations became economically powerful did governments begin to see the need to play a more direct role, sometimes animated by fears of slave rebellion. Ironically, during the late eighteenth century, inadequate imperial responses to disaster helped fuel independence movements. Schwartz documents surprising moments of solidarity across imperial borders, social class, and racial divides in the immediate aftermath of hurricanes. Despite such short-lived moments of “disaster utopia,” responses tended to expose and accentuate existing disparities—rich planters might receive tax breaks, while the poor had to prove themselves “worthy” of aid (p. 138). Hurricanes may not discriminate, but elites have historically found ways to bend their aftermath to their own advantage.If there is one critique to make, perhaps the final chapter could have offered more analysis, commensurate with the weight of the preceding narrative. Devoting considerable space to the ideological battles surrounding not only Hurricane Katrina but also Hurricane Sandy on the US Northeast's coast, this conclusion feels somewhat distant from the Caribbean core of the book. Reportedly, a Spanish-language edition is in preparation that will address 2017's devastating hurricane season, during which Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria inflicted record-breaking destruction. Puerto Rico's suffering threw the island's colonial position into sharp relief, tragically underlining the enduring relevance of the long history that Schwartz examines.Sea of Storms should be read widely by scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is ideal for graduate seminars, providing opportunity for methodological discussions of scope and scale, interdisciplinary sources, and historical causation. Its graceful prose should also make this book accessible to undergraduates and nonspecialists concerned with how societies respond to environmental hazards and climate change. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricanes will become fiercer than ever before witnessed—even in the longue durée of Schwartz's narrative. The insights of Sea of Storms could not be of more vital importance for the region and a warming planet.
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Ashley Carse
Vanderbilt University
- 2 shared
Christine Keiner
Rochester Institute of Technology
- 1 shared
Pamela M. Henson
- 1 shared
Xan S. Johnson
University of Utah
- 1 shared
Wendy Wilde
University of Utah
- 1 shared
Erika Bsumek
- 1 shared
Lise Thornton
University of Utah
- 1 shared
Lorie Richards
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