Gustave Lester

Gustave Lester is a historian of science with research interests in environmental history, settler colonial studies, and decolonial perspectives. 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 inEarly American Studieson the linking of industrial and imperial ambitions in the early United States and a chapter (co-authored with Jay Turner) forA Historian’s Handbook to Saving the Worldabout 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.