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.

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.