Mikael Wolfe
I am a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In my scholarship and teaching, I employ interdisciplinary historical methods to explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution.
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American and Caribbean history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American/Caribbean relations, environmental history of Latin America and the Caribbean and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see current and past course offerings in sidebar to the right). I am accepting graduate students for fall 2025, but please become familiar with my work before contacting me. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.
My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico(Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. It demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, they actively mediated knowledge between the state and society to implement the agrarian reform, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.
The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?
My book integrates environmental and technological history and social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States to answer this global question. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable. My book transforms our understanding of human-nature interactions, water policy, and agricultural development in Latin America. As such, it has been reviewed by nearly 30 US and international journals of history, technology studies, agricultural and environmental sciences, and water management.
My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather and geography shaped the revolution and socialist development process in Cuba. In my forthcoming book Climates of Revolution: How Weather and Geography Shaped Cuban Socialist Development, 1955-1971, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events, along with a diverse geography forged by an archipelago, were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians.
