Dr Simone Schleper (M.S.)

Position: Assistant professor for the global history of science, technology and the environment 

Research topics: Science and politics of nature conservation (esp. 20th and 21st century); environmental discourse and policymaking; (history of) environmental organizations and NGOs; history of ecology; environmental management, monitoring, and expertise; human-wildlife conflicts in the Anthropocene.

Methods: qualitative methods (archival research, interviews, oral history)

My projects:

• Intimate Allies: Collaborative Couples, Global Environmental Governance: My new research project investigates environmental governance networks by looking at the collaborative work of two couples who have been at the center of postwar intergovernmental environmental organizations: Juliette and Julian Huxley, and Hanne and Maurice Strong.
• Animal Migrations, Tracking, Infrastructures (Moving Animals project): Two of my recent case studies concerned spatial conflicts between migratory wildebeest and local human communities in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and mitigation efforts to allow for the migration of North American caribou close to the resource extraction infrastructures of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
• Environmental Expertise since 1960: In my first book I discuss the the failure of a global ecological turn in international environmental organizations that emerged in the postwar period, and the politics of environmental expertise in organizations such as the IUCN, UNESCO, and UNEP.