Prof. Dr. William San Martín

William San Martín is an assistant teaching professor of history at the Department of Humanities & Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA. He works at the intersections of History, Science & Technology Studies (STS), and Environmental Governance Studies. William holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He was a Visiting Scholar and a Postdoctoral Associate, jointly affiliated with the program of Science, Technology, and Society and with the History Section, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. William's current research focuses on global nitrogen governance with special attention to the rise of nitrogen science and sustainable development policy in the Global South. He specializes in the science-policy interface, earth-system governance, international development, technology and the human environment, and environmental justice and inequalities. Before focusing his attention on contemporary environmental issues, William worked on questions regarding race equity, slavery, legal systems, and state formation in the 18th and 19th centuries across the North Atlantic and the Americas. Today, he integrates many of the discussions from colonial, postcolonial and development studies, critical race theory, history and sociology of state formation, and the social history of law and policy into his teaching and scholarship. In doing so, he aims to highlight areas that tend to be overlooked in modern scholarly and public environmental governance debates, such as political economy, inequalities, violence, and colonialism. William is the recipient of the 2019 EHCA Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Environmental History awarded by the Environmental History Research Cluster Austria. He is co-editor, along with Emily O'Gorman, Mark Carey, and Sandra Swart, of the Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (under contract), and author of various peer-reviewed articles and book chapters published in fields including history of science and technology, political ecology, environmental studies, sustainable development, and Latin American studies. He currently curates the collections "Technology and Expertise" and "Histories across Species" for Arcadia, the online, peer-reviewed journal of the Rachel Carson Center and the European Society of Environmental History. As a fellow, William is working on a project titled "Unequal Nitrogen Futures: Linking Nitrogen Forms, Epistemologies, and Ontologies in Sustainable Development Science and Policy."

RCC Research Project: Unequal Nitrogen Futures

Selected Publications:

• “Global Nitrogen in Sustainable Development: Four Challenges at the Interface of Science and Policy.” In Life on Land. Encyclopedia of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, edited by W. Leal Filho, A. Azul, L. Brandli, A. Lange Salvia, T. Wall, Cham: Springer, 2020.

• with Diego Montecino. “Evidence supporting that human-subsidized free-ranging dogs are the main cause of animal losses in small-scale farms in Chile” Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 48 (2019): 240-250

• “La Revolución del Nitrógeno en Chile. Expertos, Instituciones y el Desafío de la Sustentabilidad Agrícola.” In Historia de la Ciencia y la Tecnología en Chile, edited by C. Sanhueza, L. Valderrama, Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Forthcoming)

• with Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (Under Contract)