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
Kati Lindström
holds the office of the Director of Doctoral Studies in the Division of History of Science, Tehcnology and Environment at KTH, and belongs 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.
In my work I have been interested in the interplay of personal and public in the environmental perception, more precisely on how individual experiences and cultural stereotypes influence the delineation and management of natural and cultural heritage sites (meant to be a scientific practice), and vice versa: how do individuals redefine their personal first hand experiences of landscapes according to cultural prestige and stereotypes held by larger influential groups. How is the sites' value defined and what is considered worthy of protection? What is considered sacrificeable? I have examined the mechanisms of meaning generation and identity building with the help of landscapes on individual, community and national level, analysing phenomena such as landscape protection, everyday practices, seasonality, literary representations of the environment, environmental communication and history writing, employing oral history, field work, literary texts and archival sources. Most of my work has been carried out in Japan, Antarctica and Estonia.
Jonathan Galka
Jonathan Galka
is a historian of the contemporary earth and environmental sciences, focused particularly on the oceanic dimensions of resource extraction since the mid-20th century.
One major strand of my work is interested in the ways that the evolution of global ocean governance systems concurrent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea process coevolved with the development of deep ocean sciences. My doctoral dissertation and book project, In Such Abundance: A History of the Ocean that Minerals Promised, examines how mineral concretions called manganese (polymetallic) nodules became a novel resource frontier over the 1960s-1970s through epistemic contests over the possibility of material plenitude, the nature of the deep-sea environment, and the character of the marine resource commons. The project looks to explain how and why contemporary seabed resource governance has become broadly intractable. Recently, I have extended these interests in the character of claims about marine resource abundance to consider the advent and eclipse of oceanic renewable energy technologies, especially ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), around the same time. This work follows OTEC from its roots in experiments across the colonial tropics through to its contemporary manifestations as one potential tool with which to address small island precarity in the unfolding climate crisis.
A second major strand of my work looks at layers of ocean governance within and beyond global legal architectures by attending to how vernacular and indigenous structures of marine tenure and resource stewardship have alternatively engaged or contested technoscientific tools and management.
Emil Flatø
Emil Flatø
is a historian of science whose work examines how modern societies have come to understand, anticipate, and govern futures that extend beyond human political time horizons.
Flatø’s research focuses on the emergence of scientific practices that engage with deep and uncertain futures, particularly in the late twentieth century. He has written on the development of climate modeling in the 1970s, a period when scientists began to construct predictive frameworks for planetary change long before its most visible effects were realized. His work traces how these early efforts reshaped the role of science itself, transforming it from a discipline grounded in observation of the present into one increasingly oriented toward the projection, management, and ethical implications of possible futures.
More broadly, Flatø is interested in the history of what might be called anthropogenic knowledge: the ways in which humans have come to understand themselves as agents within Earth systems. His research situates climate science alongside other long-duration experimental practices, including the nineteenth-century soil experiments still running today, which register ecological change across generations. Through these cases, he explores how scientific institutions attempt to stabilize knowledge across temporal scales that exceed individual lifetimes, and how such efforts challenge conventional distinctions between present action and future consequence.
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
is an interdisciplinary sustainability researcher, and currently coordinator at the Centre of Excellence for Anthropocene History at KTH. His doctoral work looked at personal, organisational and research policy tensions faced by climate researchers in transdisciplinary settings, through an on-the-ground ethnographic study. His current research looks at the links between the field of futures research and the Anthropocene. He has also lead interdisciplinary sustainability courses focused on economics and design at CEMUS Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University.
