Sarah Sears
Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Environmental Studies
History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences
Sarah Sears is a historian of transnational environmental connections between modern Latin America and the United States. Her current research focuses on the environmental history of migration from the U.S. West to northern Mexico between the 1880s and 1950. Her article in Diplomatic History, titled “Beyond the River’s Violence: Rethinking the Chamizal Dispute,” was awarded the 2024 Bernath Scholarly Article Prize for best article on U.S. foreign relations by an early-career scholar by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Her forthcoming contribution to the edited volume Rivers on the Move (Duke University Press, 2026) examines histories of dispossession and environmental crisis along the Rio Grande. Sarah holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. At Reed, she teaches courses on environmental history and environmental justice in the Western Hemisphere and the Environmental Studies Program’s project-based junior seminar.