Dr Simone Schleper (M.S.)

Research 

My research sits at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science and knowledge, tracing how global organizations, scientific experts, local communities, and their relationships to environments and non-human animals have shaped conservation policy from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I pay particular attention to questions of power and translation: who gets to define "nature," whose knowledge counts, and which arguments are accepted. Gender and postcolonial critique run through all my work.

Position: Assistant Professor, Global History of Science, Technology, and the Environment 

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the History of Knowledge

Regional Representative (BNL) to the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH)

Research interests: Science and politics of nature conservation (20th–21st century);  History of environmental organizations and NGOs; History of ecology; Environmental management, monitoring, and expertise;  Human-wildlife conflict in the Anthropocene; Go-betweens and 'local' knowledge

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

Research Projects

Between field and fora: Non-Western gatekeepers in international environmental policymaking, 1960s-1980s NWO Veni grant, 2026-2029

Since the 1960s, Asian, Latin American, African and Eastern European conservationists working for international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) have played important roles in bridging the interests of local communities with international conservation guidelines. Yet, we know very little about the role of these regional representatives in shaping common visions of human-nature relationships. The project studies their roles as gatekeepers. It adds their neglected voices to our historical record and contributes to current discussion on how to integrate indigenous knowledge and interests in environmental policy.

Intimate Allies: Collaborative Couples, Global Environmental Governance NWO OCXS grant, 2023-2025

This 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 postdoc, part of the Moving Animals project, 2019-20022

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. A third discusses the making of European networks of ornithologies in the postwar period

Environmental Expertise since 1960 Phd research, part of the Nature's Diplomats project, 2012-2017

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.