Visiting Scholars and Fellowships

Bethany Wiggin is currently on research leave from the University of Pennsylvania where she is Professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies. While on leave, she is a visiting researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In 2024-25 she was the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. From 2014-24, she served as the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship bridges fields: environmental and energy humanities, public humanities, critical university studies, anthropocene history, utopianism and future studies, and early modern studies. She has written extensively about trade and migration as well as language and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the north Atlantic world; while on leave, she is completing the monograph, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, and doing field work with energy justice activists working to oppose the massive build out of liquid natural gas facilities.

Recent publications include two special issues (in press), one on environmental futures with the World Futures Review and the other on participatory research methods for energy justice with the journal Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities The latter publishes articles made by the Intersecting Energy Cultures working group  that Wiggin co-led from 2022-2024. Bethany also published an article on activists’ opposition to the expansion of natural gas infrastructure in Europe and the U.S. and the transatlantic networks and stories they’re creating in the volume The Energy Trilemma in the Baltic Sea Region, and she co-authored two articles on the public environmental humanities, one published in the journal Resistance and the other, co-authored with former students and in press in the journal Environmental Humanities. She is currently advising a NSF grant to the National Humanities Alliance designed to document and report on environmental arts-science research projects and is expanding a lecture given at Princeton, “ Toward a Civic Science ,” into an article that may become a book.

She holds research to be a human right and regularly leads public research projects designed to connect academic and community expertise for environmental and climate repair. These projects have been supported by (selected) the National Geographic, Whiting, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and include: Intersecting Energy Cultures, An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, Data Refuge, Futures Beyond Refining,and My Climate Story. She has offered testimony about project findings to audiences ranging from school children, to the City Council of Philadelphia, the U.S. Congress, and UNESCO.

Giovanni Fava  was a visiting researcher in Spring 2025 at the Centre for Anthropocene History, during which time he completed writing his PhD manuscript.

His project aims to explore the concept of the “Anthropocene” in both its scientific definition and philosophical reception. The first part of the research adopts a historical-epistemological approach and analyzes the various scientific meanings of the Anthropocene, particularly as developed within the scientific debate over the last 20 years. It traces the evolution and development of the concept, investigating its various scientific meanings, such as the “stratigraphic” meaning, the “Earth system science” perspective, the “evental” meaning (i.e., the Anthropocene as an event), and the various diachronous declinations of the concept. The second part focuses on the philosophical interpretation of the concept, examining how it has been received within the social and human sciences, particularly in its connection with ontology and the problem of agency. In particular, it focuses on new materialist, post-humanist, accelerationist, eco-Marxist, technocratic, and other interpretations of the concept, adopting a historical-philosophical approach. The third part of the research aims to merge these two conceptual frameworks—scientific and philosophical—to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Anthropocene through the lens of "transcendental geology." This concept, derived from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, highlights the constitutive relationship that connects human experience to its material and terrestrial roots. The project delves on this notion developing the connection between the embodied and perceptive roots (adopting a broad interpretation of perception that includes non-human and even geological forms of life) of systemic perspectives and their ontological consequences (i.e., the idea of the Earth as a totality).

Sebastian Lundsteen is a historian and anthropologist whose research interests lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Humanities, with an empirical emphasis on the Nordic Region. His PhD examined chemical pollution, technoscientific expertise, and environmental justice investigating the role of knowledge, evidence, science and expertise in one of the most polluted areas in Denmark. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Copenhagen, where he is exploring how technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage came to dominate Danish climate politics. His next project, RESTOMine, will entail extensive interdisciplinary fieldwork at mining sites in Sápmi to understand the technical, political, social and cultural processes of mining closure, community inclusion, and scientific studies in a colonial context.

He is interested in exploratory methods and deeply committed to public facing research. This includes hosting a podcast titled “Challenging Nordic Innocence” and collaborating with Danish artist Asbjørn Skou to adapt his PhD dissertation into a graphic novel.

Enrique Antonio Mejía recently defended his PhD thesis in Economic History at the Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2020-25). He also holds a BA in Anthropology with a minor in Environmental Studies from San Jose State University (2014-17) and a MSc in Human Ecology from Lund University, with coursework at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (2017-19). From 2020-23, he helped launch the Degrowth Journal as a Founding Editor. Generally, he is interested in critical social theory and the environmental humanities. His specific research interests include: the political ecologies of food systems, the environmental histories of Latin America, and discovering new and old ways of combining historical and human geographical methods and theories.

While at the Centre, Enrique will focus on expanding portions of his PhD thesis which analyzed soybean commodity frontier expansion in the Argentine countryside and attendant soil nutrient loss as well as develop a research agenda on the expansion of maize as feed rather than food in Mexico. For this latter topic, he has received a Fellowship from the Tiny Beam Fund to write and disseminate the findings for a Guidance Memo, a public-facing and accessible research report. He looks forward to engaging in conversations around how one can "do Anthropocene History" as well as participating in various workshops and seminars at the Centre.

From September to December 2024, Iván González Iglesias was a visiting student at the Centre. He holds a Bachelor degree in Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He is committed to contributing to planetary, diverse, affective transitions towards more adequate living patterns with the web of Life in an (unequally) ruined world. Thus, apart from investing time in learning from non-Western alternative possible worlds and their systemic critiques, he is trying to appreciate closer examples by working with some rural communities in Spain who suffered from great forest fires between 2021 and 2023, researching in participatory and intervening formats to learn from their complex affective regimes towards the territory and “translating” some valuable teachings through the writing of short tales.

At the Division he was engaged with designing different collective initiatives  related with the testing of the “arts of scholaring” in a damaged planet. For that purpose, he is contributing to design a reading discussion circle, a seminar and a workshop that brings the Division out of its “knowledge fortress” inviting speakers who come from different backgrounds (academic and more-than-academic) and whose aim is to build up stories of the “Academy of the Anthropocene”. Iván is looking forward to publishing an article reviewing his work at the Division and to digging in the existing Master programs around the Anthropocene. Moreover, he will be contributing to further collective actions related to the fight for Life in the communities he is being part of during his stay, like the swing dancers community in Stockholm.

In September and October 2024, we welcomed Thomas Turnbull  from the Max Planck Instutute for the History of Science and Technology in Berlin. Among other activities, while here Thomas co-organised the HEPM II Workshop on Planetary Modelling,  and presented his co-authored forthcoming book.  Thomas studied history and geography at Kings College London and the University of Oxford. He completed a thesis in 2017, titled “From Paradox to Policy: The Problem of Energy Resource Conservation in Britain and America, 1865–1981,” which provided the first history of energy resource conservation as both a form of science and policy.

Thomas has previously worked as a policy advisor for a London-based environmental think tank involved in implementing the European Eco-design Directive. He has also been part of a project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Anthropology, which was dedicated to preserving endangered languages via the creation of an audio database.