Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

Professor Schwartz is an environmental anthropologist whose research explores how the climate crisis and the global rise of renewable energy intersect with Indigenous peoples' environmental relations, practices of resistance, and political and economic life in Latin America.

Dr. Schwartz is developing his first book project, titled Wind Rush: Indigeneity and the Making of Renewable Energy in Colombia (under contract at Stanford University Press). This ethnography traces the multifaceted ways in which Indigenous Wayúu communities, energy experts, and state bureaucrats experience, negotiate, and shape the shift from coal mining to wind farming in La Guajira, one of the windiest places on the planet and the ancestral land of the Wayúu – the most numerous Indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela. The book details the social, infrastructural, and territorial conditions that enable companies to build dozens of wind farms in Wayúu land and the ways in which Indigenous actors exert, often in partial and fraught ways, some degree of agency over global decarbonization agendas, opening new possibilities for counterhegemonic energy futures. This work bridges debates in environmental anthropology, political ecology, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and Latin American studies.

He is also working on a second book project, tentatively titled Vanishing Oil: Life amid the Ruins of a Petro-State. This project examines the material, affective, political, and environmental reconfigurations that arise in places where the prosperity brought about by oil revenue disappears. While discussions on the climate crisis have stressed the planetary unsustainability of fossil fuels, Vanishing Oil traces ethnographically what ideas, practices, and imaginaries of social justice and the good life are emerging among Venezuelans who have endured the collapse of its oil industry and the political order in which it was embedded. These range from experiencing chronic blackouts and hyperinflation to grappling with infrastructural decay, fuel shortages, and the toll of family separations caused by the exodus of over a quarter of the national population.

Dr. Schwartz’s writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Economic Anthropology, Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Environment & Society, Anthropology News, Istor, and other publications. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren, Tinker, and Mellon Foundations, the University of Chicago’s Center for International Social Science Research, and the Pozen Center for Human Rights, among others. Before joining the University of Rochester in 2026, Dr. Schwartz was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and Colorado College.

Research Interests

• Extractive capitalism
• Renewable energy
• Energy transitions and the afterlives of oil
• Climate change
• Corporations and corporate responsibility
• Infrastructures
• Borders
• Indigeneity
• Indigenous environmental politics
• Colombia and Venezuela
• Latin America and the Caribbean