Theresa Ventura, PhD

Theresa Ventura holds an MA and PhD in History from Columbia University and a BA in History and women's studies from Brooklyn College.  Her research draws together the histories of United States foreign relations, medicine, agriculture, and the environment.  Her current manuscript, tentatively titled Growing Empire: Nature and Power in the American Colonial Philippines, investigates American attempts to recast rural life and agricultural production in the Philippines, then the United States' most populous formal colony, and considers the impact of this project on Philippines politics, health, and nature.  

Education

BA, Brooklyn College, MA, Ph.D., Columbia University

Articles & Book Chapters

"Consider the Coconut: Scientific Agriculture and the Racialization of Risk in the American Colonial Philippines, Journal of Transnational American Studies 13:1 (2022), 45-67.
http://doi.org/10.5070/T813158137

"A Drought So Extraordinary: The 1911 ENSO and Disaster Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines," in Philip Gooding, ed., Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (2022). Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies.
https://rdcu.be/cOnRU

"I Am Already Annexed: Ramon Reyes Lala and the Crafting of 'Philippine' Advocacy for American Empire," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 2020). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781420000092

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Reviews

Review of Yoshiko Nagano, State and finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941: the mismanagement of an American colony for Economic History Review (May 2016).

Current Major Grants

FRQSC, L'Empire Reconstitue: les Pratiques de Developpement des Americains aux Philippines de 1898 a 1946, September 2015-March 2018

Select Conferences, Workshops, and Talks

"'The Magic Liquid that Guarantees the Life of the Infant': Breast Milk as Food and Medicine in the Philippines, 1880-1924," Association for Asian Studies, Seattle, WA, March 31-April 3, 2016

“Colonial Land Reform and Inequality in the American Colonial Philippines,” Political Economy Seminar, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, November 17, 2014

“Progressive Plantations: Visions of Development of Philippine Friar Lands,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 2014

“Who Cured Beriberi? What an American Historian Learned from Ileto,”Historiography and Nation since Pasyon and Revolution: Conference in Honor of Professor Reynaldo C. Ileto, Manila,Philippines, February 8-9, 2013

“The Malnourished Tropics: Beriberi, Nutrition, and the Remapping of Monsoon Asia,” Anatomies of Knowledge: Medicine. Science, and Health in Asia Workshop, Social Science Research Council Inter-Asia Conference, Hong Kong,June 6-8, 2012

“Market Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and Natural Resource Management,” The Library of Congress, Washington DC, October 15, 2011

Courses

Fall 2025

HIST 324
The United States in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The period from 1877 to 1924 witnessed the transformation of the US from a rural debtor nation into an urban, industrial, financial and military power. Accompanying this transformation was an unprecedented gap between the wealthy and the poor, and increases in global migration and mobility. This course asks how people from all walks experienced, interpreted, and sought to control these changes. How did industrialization and migration reshape gendered and racialized identities? What were the struggles to define the relationship between individual liberty and the social good? How did political actions and social movements change the meaning of democracy, the role of government, and the boundaries of citizenship in the US and abroad? 

Winter 2026

HIST 253 X
History of the United States since the Civil War Era

This course is a survey of United States history from the end of the Civil War to roughly 2001. It tracks the county's development from an agricultural nation to an industrial world power, and a post-industrial consuming nation. It asks how contests for power among different classes and groups animated US political, economic, and cultural development. Thematically, we pay close attention to changing definitions of freedom, experiences of citizenship, and expressions of nationalism. Chronologically, we cover watershed moments in US history, from emancipation & Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Great Depression & Two World Wars, the Cold War, to the social and political realignments of the post-WWII era. 

HIST 403
Honours Methodology Seminar

This course is designed to help honours students conceptualize their research and contemplate - in a community of their peers - the joys and challenges of the historical craft, particularly the challenge of working with and within archives that are also historically produced. What kinds of empirical arguments should and can we make when we view our sources in light of what others have called "the archival turn"?