Contact
Leopoldstr. 11a, 4. OG, 421
80802 Munich
Room:
428
Email:
Spencer.Adams@rcc.lmu.de
Spencer Adams began a postdoctoral position with the Chair of Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center in October 2023. Trained initially in the physical sciences and then as an interdisciplinary scholar with focuses on science and technology studies and critical theory, his research broadly concerns the social relations of knowledge work, the history of climate and environmental science, and how the everyday experience of work and working life encounters environmentral extremity and transformation. Spencer’s work is informed by interests spanning a range of topics, including critical theories of scientific reason, science and speculative fiction, critical geography, and ecological critiques of capitalist political economy.
He holds an MA (2018) and a PhD (2023) in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral research took the history of Antarctic scientific research stations as a case study for examining the forms and regimes of labor as well as the social and technical infrastructures that lie behind the production of the “global environment” as an object of knowledge. He's currently at work on an expansion of this project as a book titled Beneath the Global Environment: Workplace Stories of the Antarctic.
Selected Publications:
- "Workers’ control and the political imaginaries of Callenbach’s Ecotopia." The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal (November 2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/27708888.2025.2596543.
- “Navigating Waves of Capital and History: On Speculation and Submersion in Delany’s ‘Atlantis: 1924’.” Science Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (November 2023): 346-367. https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910325.
- “Imaginaries of Planetary Inhabitance: Polar Futurism and the Labors of Climate Science.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6, no. 3 (September 2023): 1854–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221129124.
- “Staging the Speculative: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.” Qui Parle 27, no. 2 (2018): 521–38. https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-7200512.