Edward D. Melillo

Edward D. Melillo is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He is also one of the founding members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program. Melillo teaches courses on global environmental history, the history of the Pacific World, the nineteenth-century United States, and commodities in world historical perspective. In 2020, Penguin Random House published his book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World. Melillo is also the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the Western History Association’s 2016 Caughey Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West.

He is the co-editor Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (Bloomsbury Press, 2015) and the co-editor of Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). His articles have appeared in many journals, including The American Historical Review, Past & Present, Environmental History, Environment and History, Radical History Review, World History Bulletin, and Pacific Rim Reports. He received his Ph.D. and his M.Phil. from Yale University and his B.A. from Swarthmore College.