Prof. Megan A Black

Professor Black is an associate professor in the MIT History Section. She is a historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her interests span the fields of environmental history, foreign relations history, history of capitalism, science and technology studies, and histories of the U.S. West. She is the author of "The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power," which analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world -- in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. The work garnered four prizes in different subfields. Professor Black previously taught at the London School of Economics and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and the John Sloane Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She earned her B.A. from the University of Nebraska and her Ph.D. from George Washington University.