Historian of coffee, empire, science, and the environment

Raymond M. Hyser III

Postdoctoral Fellow, Program in British, Irish, and Empire Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Portrait of Raymond M. Hyser III

Raymond M. Hyser III is a historian of the life sciences working at the intersections of Environmental History, the History of Science, and Digital Humanities. His scholarship centers on the intimate relationships between people and plants, examining through agriculture the cultivation practices, knowledge systems, and ecological transformations that shaped empires and continue to shape our world.

He completed his Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, supported by the university's Outstanding Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation,"Caribbean Ceylon: Coffee Landscapes, Knowledge Networks, and Environmental Transformation in the 19th-Century Global Tropics,"traces the south-to-south flow of cultivation techniques, coercive labor systems, and European concepts of tropical environments between the colonial Caribbean and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). He currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Program in British, Irish, and Empire Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

February 1, 2026

Chapter forthcoming in Raw Capital

A chapter is forthcoming in the edited collection Raw Capital: (Un)Natural Histories of Business and the Environment (University of Pennsylvania Press).

January 15, 2026

Started a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Texas at Austin

Began a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Program in British, Irish, and Empire Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.