Ph.D. in History, Yale University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2006.

M.Phil. in History, Yale University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2003.

Bachelor of Arts, Swarthmore College, 1997.

International Baccalaureate, The Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (Montezuma, New Mexico), 1993.

• Co-editor with James Beattie and Ryan Tucker Jones, Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2022):

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/migrant-ecologies-environmental-histories-of-the-pacific-world/

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• The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020):

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557206/the-butterfly-effect-by-edward-d-melillo/

• Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)

[Winner of the 2016 Caughey Book Prize from the Western History Association for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West; winner of the 2016 Honor Book Prize from the Denver Public Library’s Caroline Bancroft Prize Competition.]

• Co-editor with James Beattie and Emily O’Gorman, Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015)

• Co-authord with Benjamin Madley, "California Unbound: Rethinking the 'End' of Unfree Labor in the Pacific World and Beyond," California History  100, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 24-56.

• “Chile and the Pacific World,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, ed. William Beezley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Available online: 
http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-304

• “Making Sea Cucumbers Out of Whales' Teeth: Nantucket Castaways and Encounters of Value in Ninteenth-Century Fiji," Environmental History 20, no. 3 (July 2015): 449-74.

• Co-author with James Beattie and Emily O’Gorman, “Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency,” Environment and History 20, no. 4 (November 2014): 561-75.

• “Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the ‘Synthetic Age’ in World History,” Past & Present 223, no. 1 (May 2014): 233-70.

• “Cucumber Archipelago: A Nantucket Reunion in the South Pacific,” Historic Nantucket 63, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 4-9.

• “Beginning in the Belly, Ending in the Atmosphere: An Approach to Teaching Global Environmental History,” World History Bulletin 29, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 30-36.

• “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 1028-1060. [Winner of the American Society for Environmental History’s 2013 Alice Hamilton Prize for best environmental history article published during 2012; winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize (2014) for best article on nineteenth-century history].

• “Spectral Frequencies: Neoliberal Enclosures of the Electromagnetic Commons,” Radical History Review issue 112 (Winter 2012): 147-61.

• "Empire in a Cup: Imagining Colonial Geographies through British Tea Consumption," in Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire:New Views on Environmental History, ed. James Beattie, Edward D. Melillo and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).

• "A Land 'Wholly Built Upon Smoke': Colonial Virginia and the Making of the Global Tobacco Trade, 1612-1776," in Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999-2011, ed. John B. Ravenal (Charlottesville: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and University of Virginia Press, 2011).

• "Feeding 'La Boca del Puerto': Chileans and the Maritime Origins of San Francisco," in Perspectives on Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, October 2006, ed. Glenn S. Gordinier (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 2008).