Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology

Dean of Faculty

Leah VanWey came to the PSTC and Brown in 2008 and has served as the Associate Director of the PSTC. Her work focuses on the relationships between demography, environmental change, and socioeconomic development in a variety of countries. The majority of her work addresses these relationships in Brazil, examining both the landscape and socioeconomic transformations wrought by large-scale farming in Brazil’s agricultural frontier and small farmers’ livelihoods and land use in settlements in the Amazon.

VanWey also has projects across several countries on the role of climate variability and change in farm decision-making. These include a project on climate variability, interhousehold transfers, and migration in Mexico; a project on the interaction of climate variability and soil fertility in determining migration among farmers in Uganda; and analyses of the role of climate variability in the expansion or abandonment of commodity agriculture in Brazil.

Scholarly Interests

Environment and development, Land change development, Migration, Population and environment

Affiliated Departments

Department of Sociology