Thomas Lekan (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999) is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, where he is also faculty affiliate in the interdisciplinary School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment. His books, essays, and reviews explore European, East African, and transnational environmental histories of wildlife conservation, systems ecology, eco-development, and local approaches to sustainable urbanism. He is the author of Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Thomas joined the RCC this year as a Fulbright senior scholar. He will complete two short chapters of a joint book project (with Carol Hager of Bryn Mawr College, USA) called “Green Germany: The Local Roots of Global Sustainability.” In addition, he will draft the research article “‘Having Your Game and Eating It, Too’: African Wildlife, Eco-Development, and the World Protein Crisis, 1950–1980.” In July, he will lead a seminar for the RCC’s MA and PhD certificate students called “Green Cities: Historical Approaches to Sustainable Urban Living.”
Selected Publications:
- “‘A Delicate Equilibrium of the Most Complex Sort’: Competition and Community in Edward F. Ricketts’s Tidepool Ecologies, 1923–1948.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53, no. 2 (April 2023): 147–188, https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.147.
- Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
- “Our Gigantic Zoo,” interview with Eric Grube, April 11, 2023, New Books Network, podcast, 1:13, https://newbooksnetwork.com/our-gigantic-zoo.
- with Sebastián Ureta, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. “Baselining Nature: An Introduction.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619898092.
- “A Natural History of Modernity: Bernhard Grzimek and the Globalization of Environmental Kulturkritik.” New German Critique 43, no. 2 (August 2016): 55–82.