Edward D. Melillo
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2022
Edward D. Melillo is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He teaches courses on global environmental history, the history of the Pacific World, the nineteenth-century United States, and commodities in world historical perspective. In 2020, Penguin Random House published his book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World. Melillo is also the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the Western History Association’s 2016 Caughey Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West. He received his Ph.D. and his M.Phil. from Yale University and his B.A. from Swarthmore College.
