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Fellow during the summer term 2021
Antoine Acker is an environmental historian working on global connections in the age of the Anthropocene, with a specific focus on transatlantic networks spanning between Latin America and Europe. He has a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence (2014), and has researched and taught in eight different European universities. He is currently a senior lecturer and researcher at the history department of the University of Zurich and will be a research professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Graduate Institute Geneva as of September 2021. From September 2020 to March 2021, Antoine Acker was also a Researcher-in-Residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, to which he continues to be affiliated in Munich.
At the Munich Centre of Global History, he will work on a book project which analyzes the engagement and implication of historical narratives in the definition of the Anthropocene. In particular, he will address the negotiated uses of the past in the attribution of global climatic responsibilities, by exploring the historical theories underpinning the political and diplomatic concepts at stake in climate mitigation disputes.
In parallel, he is developing a project about the transnational circulation of ideas, practices, and people involved in the building of a continent-wide regime of oil production and ownership in Latin America. It studies the entwinement of energy and environmental topics in the process of nationalization of resources which accompanied the construction of post-colonial Latin American nation states and evaluates the impact of these transformations for energy transitions at a global level. This project is a contribution to an emerging academic and popular reflection about the role of the so-called Global South in the shaping of fossil globalization and the Anthropocene.