Sverker Sörlin

Sverker Sörlin, b. 1956, 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.

He serves on the editorial board of several journals and book series, including the Environmental Humanities (Duke UP),The Anthropocene Review (Sage) and the Environmental Humanities Series with Routledge. He served on the boards of museums, universities, other public agencies and research funding organizations, and is currently on the boards of the Swedish International Development Agency, Sida, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. He holds honorary doctorates from Turku University, Finland (2011) and the University of Bergen, Norway (2022). He currently leads (2018-2023) the ERC Advanced Grant projectSPHERE – Study of the Planetary Human Earth Relationship: The Rise of Global Environmental Governance (www.spheregovernance.org) at KTH with partners in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Sydney. As a writer and critic, he has published narrative non-fiction, essays, biographies, and scripts for television and film.

For further biographical details, see: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverker_S%C3%B6rlin

Further bibliographical information: Sverker Sörlin in Libris, the Swedish national bibliography database.

Appearances in radio, television, film and other broadcast media in Swedish Media Database (MDB): https://smdb.kb.se/catalog/search?q=Sverker+S%C3%B6rlin&x=21&y=13

Recent books include:The Future of Nature (Yale UP 2013),The Environment – a History of the Idea (Johns Hopkins 2018; both with Libby Robin and Paul Warde),Grounding Urban Natures:Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (with Henrik Ernstson, MIT Press 2019),Ice Humanities: Living, Working and Thinking in a Melting World(with Klaus Dodds, Manchester UP 2022),Pathways: Exploring the Routes of a Movement Heritage (with Daniel Svensson & Katarina Saltzman, White Horse Press 2022), andResource Extraction and Arctic Communities: The New Extractivist Paradigm (Cambridge UP 2023). His next book,The Human Environment: Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance(with Eric Paglia) is under contract, also with Cambridge.

Selected recent articles :

Sörlin, Sverker & Nina Wormbs (2018) Environing technologies:
a theory of making environment,History and Technology,34:2, 101-125, https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2018.1548066

Sörlin, Sverker, Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities,Research Evaluation, Volume27, Issue 4, October 2018, 287–297, https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvx030

Sörlin, S., Lane, M. Historicizing climate change—engaging new approaches to climate and history.Climatic Change151, 1–13 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2285-0

Langfeldt, L., Nedeva, M., Sörlin, S., Thomas, D. A. Co-existing Notions of Research Quality: A Framework to Study Context-specific Understandings of Good Research.Minerva, 58, 115–137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09385-2

Sörlin, Sverker & Erik Isberg (2021) Synchronizing Earthly Timescales: Ice,
Pollen, and the Making of Proto-Anthropocene Knowledge in the North Atlantic Region, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111:3, 717-728. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1823809

Sörlin, Sverker (2022) David Lowenthal’s archipelagic landscape of learning,Landscape Research, 47:4, 508-521. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2022.2040459