Room 110
Sam Hege researches the entangled histories of environmental justice, the politics of water, and the rise of industrial agriculture in the U.S. Southwest. He is working on revising a book manuscript, currently titled "Ogallala Inc.: Race, Work, and the Making of America’s Breadbasket," where he explores how efforts to commodify and extract groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer situated West Texas as the entry point to unsustainable and unjust transformations around food and energy, and how these processes in turn shaped working class livelihoods and activism. Alongside this research, Sam has worked on multiple public and digital humanities projects. He has contributed to the Climates of Inequality exhibit, The Public History Project, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities’ Democracy Conversations Project. He is currently working on developing a digital exhibition on the history of environmental justice in the Texas Panhandle.
Hege received his PhD in History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2023. In 2023-2024, he spent the year as a fellow at the Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies. At the MPIWG, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Department II, “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life” and a member of the “Environmental Knowledge in Times of Crisis” Research Group.