Rohan Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in History who studies Environmental and Latin American history, particularly land tenancy, land use and property rights. His research interests include twentieth-century Latin America, Peru; agrarian and Indigenous histories; and Anthropocene and environmental history. His dissertation project has also been generously funded by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Program, Center for Advanced Studies, Mellon Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation. 

Dissertation: When A World Moves On: Land, Life and Struggle in the Peruvian Andes

My dissertation, When A World Moves On: Land, Life and Struggle in the Peruvian Andes, traces the history of peasant agriculture over the twentieth century. Peasant agriculture is typically viewed as a marginal activity, an anachronistic holdover from an agrarian past doomed to disappear. And yet, last century, in Peru as elsewhere, peasant agriculture grew like never before. In fact, there are more peasants alive today than at any time prior and they are producing at a hitherto unforeseen scale. In a longue durée study of a single valley, I document how a century of demographic growth led to widespread land pressure, fragmentation of tenancy patterns, unprecedented intensification of agricultural production and a historic reordering of agrarian ecologies. Although chronically absent from scholarly discussions, I show how peasants contributed to the profound social and ecological transformations unfolding across the planet as well as how their experiences help reframe those changes as more than just localized to a few regions (particularly the Global North) or certain activities (like fossil fuel use and industrialization).