I am a global historian of technology, economy, and the environment with a particular focus on globalization processes, the intersection of ecology and economy, and the era of the Anthropocene. My research interests range from the international trade in hazardous waste material and toxicity as a historical construction, the intellectual history of economic ecological thinking, to verticality as an enviro-historical concept and the study of marine space. My research has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them from the Smithsonian Institution, the Science History Institute, and the University of Pennsylvania.

I work at the intersection of environmental history and environmental humanities. I am co-speaker of the International Doctoral Program Um(Welt)Denken. Rethinking Environment. The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society, hosted by Augsburg University and LMU Munich.  homepage IDK - Rethinking Environment

Prior to Augsburg, I served as PI and Project Director of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group “Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy” at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. homepage RCC LMU - Hazardous Travels

Selected Publications

Monographs

• Wiring the world. The social and cultural creation of global telegraph networks. Columbia Studies in International and Global History, Columbia University Press, 2016. link to publisher
• The Toxic Ship. The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade, Weyerhaeuser Series in Environmental History, University of Washington Press, 2023. link to publisher

Editorships

Together with May-Brith Ohman Nielsen. Toxic timescapes. Examining toxicity across time and space. Ohio University Press, 2022. Competitively selected as one of twenty books to be made open access through the platform Knowledge Unlatched and their Focus Collection 2023: Climate Change.  link to publisher

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Toxicity,” in The Philosopher 110, 1 (2022): 57-61. article
• “Toxic commons. Global inequality in the age of the Anthropocene,” Environmental History (July 2021): 38-44. article
• “Hidden Externalities: The Globalization of Hazardous Waste,” Business History Review 93, 1 (2019): 51-74. awarded with the Henrietta Larson Prize for best publication. article
• Together with David Stradling, “Water as the Ultimate Sink: Linking Fresh and Saltwater History,” International Review of Environmental History 5, 1 (2019): 23-41.  article
• “Rettet die Erde vor den Ökonomen? Lawrence Summers’ Memo und der Kampf um die Deutungshoheit über den internationalen Giftmüllhandel,“ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 56 (2017), 353-373. article
• “A Wave of Interest and Action for Planet Earth? How UNEP Spoke for the Environment from Stockholm to Rio,” Heidi Tworek et al. (Eds.), International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (Routledge Studies in Modern History), Routledge 2018, 204-231. link to publisher

Academic Positions

Heisenberg-Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities
University of Augsburg                                                                                           since February 2023

Professor for Contemporary History (part-time replacement)                                 April-Sept 2022
Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg

Project Director & Principal Investigator                                                   Sept 2016 - January 2023
Ludwig Maximilian University, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
DFG Emmy-Noether Research Group
“Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy”

Guest Professor
University of Vienna, Department of Science and Technology Studies                                Spring 2021

Lecturer for North American History                                                                                   2013-2016
Albert Ludwig University Freiburg, Dept. of History

Lecturer for North American History                                                                                   2011-2013
Freie Universität Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies