People

Sabine Höhler

Sabine Höhler  is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she serves as Head of Department of Philosophy and History. She holds a MSc degree in physics and a PhD in history of science and technology. Her research addresses the intersections of technoscience and the history of the earth sciences in a global historical perspective, from atmospheric physics to physical oceanography and space ecology. Her recent work addresses the history of sustainability studies at the turn to the twenty-first century with case studies on ecological accounting systems, biodiversity management, stress ecology, resilience, remote sensing, and terraforming. Her publications include the monograph Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990 (Pickering & Chatto 2015, paperback edition Routledge 2016) on the spaceship as a key metaphor in the late twentieth-century debate over the world’s resources and the future of humankind and the co-edited theme issue “Writing History in the Anthropocene”, published 2020 in Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft/Journal for Historical Social Sciences.

Adam Wickberg

Adam Wickberg  is a docent in History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is the co-director of the VR Excellence Centre for Anthropocene History and the deputy director of the KTH Environmental humanities lab. His work focuses on the critical intersection of digitalization and sustainability in its social, political and historical dimensions, as well as the Anthropocene as history. At KTH he works on the research project The Mediated Planet: Claiming data för environmental SDGs. Between 2021-2023 he was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of science in Berlin where he belonged to the research group Anthropocene Formations. He has published widely on media, science, technology and the environment and its history, politics and epistemologies in leading international journals and books.

His research focuses on environmental data, digitalization and sustainability, and the history of the Anthropocene.

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 has studied the intersections of architecture, science and technology, and political philosophy in southern Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her PhD research examined how the South African mining industry shaped models and concepts of life in deep space during the Cold War.

While attending to histories of labor, race, and gender, she foregrounds questions about measurement, the language of standards, and the future of 'the human' in environments that are hostile to biological life. In recent years, her work has been supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the History of Science Society, as well as the Canadian Center for Architecture. In 2020-2021, Megan completed her PhD in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University and was a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Witwatersrand.

Oscar Hartman Davies

Oscar defended his DPhil thesis at the School of Geography and the Environment in January 2024 and is currently working as a Social Sciences Engagement Fellow between the School and Youngwilders, a youth-led nature recovery organisation based in the UK which he co-founded.

He is an environmental geographer whose work centres around the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘digital ecologies’, and his DPhil thesis considers the mobilisation of seabirds as sentinels of environmental change, and their entanglement in digital transformations in ocean governance.

His current fellowship seeks to integrate social scientific insights on effective participatory approaches to nature’s recovery into the work of Youngwilders and the European Young Rewilders network, and he is also working as a visiting researcher between KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

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 and 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.