Alex Standen
Contact Info:
Breland 252
Education:
B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 2010
M.A., Tulane University, 2016
Ph.D., University of Colorado, 2022
Research and Teaching Interests:
Hurricanes and disaster events, agriculture, history of energy, social movements, labor history.
Alex Standen is an environmental and labor historian of the U.S. and Latin America. He writes about the environmental history of U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the workers’ movements that have shaped that history in the twentieth century.
His current book project, How Strikes, Storms, and Sugarcane Made the Puerto Rican New Deal, examines the environmental and labor histories of the Puerto Rican New Deal. It aims to widen our gaze by arguing that the Puerto Rican New Deal was propelled and conditioned by organized workers and farmers, together with the crops they cultivated, the disaster events they confronted, and the political ecologies they both challenged and helped construct.
This project was born in 2015, when he lived in the Puerto Rican mountains and worked on a farm and on an environmental education project. These experiences have strengthened his conviction to understand history through the interactions between ordinary people and environments and to put history in conversation with the present.
His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Tinker Foundation, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation, and the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences.
Selected Publications:
“Striking for Public Power: Workers, Energy and the Nationalization of Puerto Rico’s Electrical Grid, 1933-1941,” Journal of Political Ecology, Volume 31, Issue 1, (May 2024).
“Building a Puerto Rico ‘Better Than the One We Lost’: Hurricane San Felipe II and the Puerto Rican New Deal,” Environment and History, Volume 29, Issue 3, (August 2023).
“Puerto Rico Needs Public Power, Not More Disastrous Privatization,” Jacobin, (Sept. 27, 2022).
“Confronting Colonial Capitalism,” New Labor Forum, Volume 29, Issue 1, (Winter 2020).
Courses:
HIST 1140: World History II
HIST 400: Nature and Society
HIST 311: Colonial Latin America
HIST 300: US Environmental History
HIST 300: Climate, Disease, and Disaster: An Introduction to Environmental History
