Sverker Sörlin
Sverker Sörlin has a long-standing career in scholarship, policy advice, academic leadership, and as a public intellectual. Trained as an intellectual historian (PhD 1988), he became Professor of Environmental History at Umeå University in 1993, and assumed in 2007 his current professorship in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH in Stockholm where he was a co-founder of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (2012).
He has held appointments and visiting positions in universities and institutes in Sweden and abroad, including UC Berkeley, Cambridge, Cape Town, Oslo, UBC Vancouver, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Since 2019 he is a Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes on Environmental Humanities at SCAS, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study at Uppsala University (in part time residence during the academic year 2022-23).
A specialist in the history of environmental field sciences, his current research is on the formation of global environmental governance and the science and politics of the cryosphere, climate change, and the Anthropocene. He is a government adviser on research and environmental policy and, during the past few years, has worked in particular on the history and future of the humanities. From 2018 to 2022 he was a member of Sweden’s Climate Policy Council of eight autonomous experts charged with evaluating, on an annual basis, the government’s policies to reach the net zero emission target by 2045
Susanna Lidström
Susanna Lidström is a researcher in environmental humanities at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. With a background in literary studies, her research focuses on environmental narratives and their form, function and development over time. She is especially interested in narrative representations of the ocean. She mostly studies non-fiction, including scientific concepts, policy frameworks, and popular discourses.
She is a visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she is currently based. Recent publications include “The metaphor of “ocean health” is problematic; “the ocean we want” is a better term” (with Tirza Meyer and Jesse Peterson, Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022), “Ocean literacy and marine environmental narratives: interpretations of sustainability in the deep sea” (Resilience, forthcoming) and “Ocean environing media: datafication and governance of the deep sea” (with Johan Gärdebo and Adam Wickberg, in Environing Media, ed. Gärdebo and Wickström, forthcoming).
Kati Lindström
At KTH Kati Lindström holds the office of the Director of Doctoral Studies in the Division of History of Science, Tehcnology and Environment and belong to the Steering Group of the Division.
Kati is a scholar of environmental humanities with a background in semiotics, anthropology, environmental history and geography and trained at the University of Kyoto (Japan) and University of Tartu (Estonia). She holds a docent degree in the history of science, technology and environment, with specialization environmental humanities and uses of history from KTH from 2021.
Gustave Lester
Gustave Lester is a historian of science with research interests in environmental history and Indigenous studies. He completed his doctoral program in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in November 2023.
His doctoral dissertation showed how the emergence of the United States as a global industrial power in the late nineteenth century depended on over a century of geologically mapping and expropriating the minerals-rich lands of North American Indigenous nations. More recent work includes an article in Early American Studies on the linking of industrial and imperial ambitions in the early United States and a chapter (co-authored with Jay Turner) for A Historian’s Handbook to Saving the World about how shifting energy regimes—including our contemporary green energy transition—disproportionately impacts underprivileged and frontline communities.
As a postdoctoral researcher in the Center of Excellence for Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Gustave will investigate “critical minerals” in history as a fundamental political, discursive, and material dimension of the Anthropocene. This research centers the early mineral seeking activities of Franco- and Anglo-American empires as well as the conceptual development of “critical minerals” from within the professional discourse and products of international geoscientists.
Megan Eardley
Megan Eardley is an architectural historian with research interests in political theory as well as science and technology studies. She completed her PhD at Princeton University in November 2023.
Her doctoral dissertation demonstrated how the development of ultra-deep mining in Apartheid South Africa shaped, and was shaped by, attempts to monetize debt as well as gold in the second half of the twentieth century.
It analyzed how the mining industry's models and concepts of deep space have informed limits to growth debates-- and driven new demands for life and labor in heavily mined communities.
Her current research foregrounds questions about measurement, extreme heat, and the future of 'the human' in environments that are hostile to biological life
Oscar Hartman Davies
Oscar Hartman Davies is an environmental and cultural geographer from London. He completed his DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford in 2024, and has held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, the University of Helsinki, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Before starting as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Anthropocene History, he worked as a Social Sciences Engagement Fellow between the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery at Oxford and Youngwilders, a nature recovery organisation he co-founded.
Oscar’s doctoral thesis developed an understanding of how and with what implications animals are enrolled in processes of monitoring and responding to environmental change, focusing empirically on seabirds and the monitoring and management of commercial fisheries. He is interested in how environmental governance and conservation practices are changing in light of the Anthropocene, particularly in the oceans, and has been centrally involved in the emerging research field of digital ecologies. His current research focuses on river environments, in the context of histories and contemporary practices of wastewater disposal, landscape connectivity, and invasive species management.
Lakin Anderson
Lakin Anderson completed his PhD at Uppsala University in Organization and Management studies with a focus on sustainability, in 2023. The dissertation studied climate researchers at work, taking an organizational look at the challenges and possibilities of transdisciplinary sustainability research. It identified and analyzed paradoxical tensions that arise in the on-the-ground efforts of researchers in the Climate and Energy field attempting to make their work relevant and societally impactful while working with societal actors in the Norwegian context.
Prior to his PhD he was, for 4 years, coordinating and teaching interdisciplinary courses that followed a student-centered learning philosophy at CEMUS Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. Courses focused on Sustainable Design theory and methods, and on the sustainability of the global economy. He completed his masters in Sustainable Development at Uppsala University and holds a BA in media and journalism from QUT, Brisbane, Australia.
