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Thomas Lekan

Prof. Dr. Thomas Lekan

Carson Fellow

Thomas Lekan's research has focused on nature conservation, state building, and national identity formation in Central Europe. Expanding this work through a transnational perspective, his RCC project examines postwar German and European nature conservation in a global context of decolonization, tensions over the growing influence of non-governmental actors in environmental affairs, and new media representations of nature. The accumulation of this research will be a book manuscript scheduled for publication with Oxford University Press in 2014. In addition, he will complete an essay for a forthcoming special edition of the journal New German Critique on the significance of debates about “post-humanism” for the ecological humanities. Lekan received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, and is currently an associate professor of history and a faculty associate in the Environment and Sustainability program at the University of South Carolina. He has previously been a research fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina, USA. He is a member of the Seattle-based Transatlantic Research Network in the Environmental Humanities and co-convener of the German Studies Association’s Environmental Studies network.

RCC Research Project: Saving the Serengeti: Tourism, the Cold War, and the Paradox of German Conservation in Postcolonial Africa, 1950–1985 (pdf, 12 KB)

Film Interview with Thomas Lekan


Select Publications

  • Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Edited with Thomas Zeller.
  • “A ‘Noble Prospect:’ Tourism, Heimat, and Conservation on the Rhine, 1880–1914.” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 4 (2009): 824–858.
  • “‘Serengeti Shall Not Die:’ Bernhard Grzimek, Wildlife Film, and the Making of a Tourist Landscape in East Africa.” German History 29, no. 2 (2011): 224–264.