Adele Leigh Stock

Adele is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research employs a diverse set of methods to explore the intersections of environments, infrastructure, and religious life in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century cities. Adele is the co-coordinator of the Environment and Climate History Workshop and is a Stanford Humanities Center Mellon Dissertation Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. She holds a B.A. (summa cum laude) in History from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in History from Stanford University. 

Adele’s dissertation offers an enviro-religious history of Kampala, Uganda’s wetland ecosystems. It examines how colonial and postcolonial regimes in the city have worked to construct spatial and ecological hierarchies by targeting wetlands and their residents for control, drainage, and more recently, conservation. Drawing on oral histories, archival research, and analysis of ritual, the dissertation examines the spiritual and material practices that have historically animated life in Kampala’s swamps. It argues that wetlands were sites of both colonial ecological anxieties and places where forms of resistance and gendered spiritual authority thrived.