Mentor: Elizabeth Chatterjee, Assistant Professor, History
Elena Tiedens is a fourth year in the College studying History with a concentration in Environmental History, and a minor in Russian and Eastern European Studies. She is particularly interested in energy history. Tiedens has also held internships in domestic and international environmental policy and law at the Wilderness Society and the Earth Law Center. Following her time at UChicago, Tiedens has been selected as a Gates Cambridge scholar to study the environmental and energy history of the Arctic.
As a Polsky Research Fellow, Tiedens worked with Professor Chatterjee on a project exploring the global energy and environmental crisis in the 1970s from the perspective of the Global South. Tiedens conducted in-person and digital archival work to address multiple facets of Professor Chatterjee’s research. Some crucial topics included: global oceanic politics and the Common Heritage of the Ocean movement; fertilizer markets and cartels; drought and energy crisis from the perspective of the Soviet Union; and drought and energy crisis from a variety of perspectives in Sub-Saharan African.
“This internship helped my future career in climate because I want to be an environmental historian and thus getting the opportunity to work with such an esteemed environmental historian was a truly wonderful opportunity. Through this internship, I learned more about the theory and practice of environmental history. If I become an environmental historian, this will of course be invaluable. Even if I go in another direction, I know environmental history has made me a much better and more nuanced thinker about climate and environmental issues.”