Hannah Conway

Hannah Conway is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ). Hannah is an environmental historian with research expertise in the history and philosophy of science, technology, and environmental justice in the US South.

Hannah's first book project, How Infrastructures Age: Engineering, Nature, and Environmental Justice examines how aging large technological infrastructures have adversely affected environmental and community health in the lower Mississippi Delta. This research pushes back the timeline in which environmental justice conflicts are considered and argues that understanding the present material conditions in the Delta requires full and accurate historical accounting of how their development was integral to Southeastern Native removal, plantation economies, and the ongoing proliferation of racial capitalism and disenfranchisement that forms the bedrock of environmental racism. It also works to reclaim Southeastern Native epistemological authority over Southeastern Native lands and centers Indigenous sovereignty and community self-determination in consideration of what environmental justice can and should look like in the US Deep South.

Hannah's work has been generously supported by funding from The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, The Department of History of Science at Harvard Hiebert Fellowships, Louisiana State University Special Collections Libraries, The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, the Linda Hall Library, and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.