JESSICA DICARLO

Dr. Jessica DiCarlo is a human geographer and political ecologist. At the University of Utah, she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability, and Faculty in Environmental Humanities and Asian Studies. She is a Public Intellectual Program Fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations and a 2023-24 Wilson China Fellow, and was the 2026 recipient of the Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology.

Dr. DiCarlo writes on resource politics, global China, and geopolitics. Her expertise is centered on China, and her interest in borderlands motivated research and work across Southeast, Central, and South Asia. It is informed by several years in the NGO and education sectors in Tibet and China, where she began working in 2008. Her research has been published in Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, Ecology and Society, Geopolitics, Area, Ambio, Extractive Industries and Society, Globalizations, and in multiple books; she is the co-editor of The Rise of the Infrastructure State (Bristol University Press 2022). She uses multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-lingual methods to conduct immersive and socially engaged research, and is committed to long-term fieldwork and relies on ethnography to connect meticulous, ground-level cases with global processes.

She is on the editorial board of The People’s Map of Global China and Global China Pulse journal, both within Global China Lab. She is the co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory and host of a New Books Network podcast. Dr. DiCarlo was elected an At-Large Councilor (2024-26) for the Cultural & Political Ecology (CAPE) specialty group of the American Association of Geographers. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of British Columbia, a Global China Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center (2019), a Research Fellow at the University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment in Laos (2018-20), a USAID Research and Innovations Fellow in India (2015), and a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow in Dalian, China (2009-10). She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and masters in Development Studies at the University of California Berkeley.

Jessica is interested in working with students and scholars on research that develops novel insights into topics related to Global China, infrastructure, development, resource politics, political ecology in Southeast Asia, critical geopolitics, and the geographies and politics of low-carbon transition and critical minerals.

She is an avid outdoors person, whether backpacking in the Himalayas, canyoneering in Utah, skiing with her huskies, or cycling (and eating) her way around Taiwan.