I work at the intersections of environmental history, history of science, and international relations. My first major research project culminated in The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (Columbia University Press, 2018). In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But hope could be found in world government. The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment tells the story of how cosmopolitan scientists and bureaucrats affiliated with UN agencies set out to make individuals conscious of their membership in a world community and ended up building the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible.

My new project emerged out of my fascination with scientists’ scale-making practices, experiences teaching global environmental history and “Big History,” and the urgency that the Anthropocene inspires for reflection on epochal ruptures. “The Holocene Is History: Human Nature at the End of the Last Ice Age” explores how scientists from the late-nineteenth century to the present assembled fragmentary traces of the past to explain the origins of civilization. The early Holocene provides a fertile field for interdisciplinary experimentation because it occupies a liminal scale between the geologist’s unfathomable deep time and the historian’s chronicle of generations. It is the period in which natural history and human history, the biologist and the archaeologist meet as equals. The stories of world altering floods, megafauna extinctions, and agricultural origins that spin out of these encounters provide ecological and moral baselines for the current environmental crisis.