Molly Warsh

My training in Atlantic history and embrace of world history and environmental humanities shape my scholarship, teaching, and commitment to dialogue with K-12 teachers. My undergraduate courses range widely and include (but are not limited to) classes on world history, early modern Iberian empires, global piracy, empires and the environment, and the global Caribbean. I work with graduate students on numerous related fields. As Director of the Alliance for Learning in World History (ALWH), based at the World History Center at Pitt, I coordinate yearly professional development workshops for educators at all levels.
My first book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire 1492-1700 (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2018) considered the global repercussions of patterns of human and environmental resource management established in the sixteenth-century Spanish Caribbean pearl fisheries. My current book project, Servants of the Seasons: Temporary Mobilities in the Early Modern Atlantic World, explores multi-species migrations and place-making with a particular focus on liminal ecologies and their inhabitants. My July 2025 article in Environmental History, “Seasonal Harvests: Migration, Reproduction, and Religion in the Early Modern Spanish Tuna Fisheries” (winner of the Leopold-Hidy award for the best article published in the journal during the calendar year), offers a glimpse of this project. I am also the Editor of the Journal of Early Modern History and President of the Forum on Early-modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI).