Dr Frank Uekotter

• PhD Bielefeld University, 2001
• Habilitation, Bielefeld University, 2009

I studied history, political science and the social sciences at the universities of Freiburg and Bielefeld in Germany, the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. I earned, or at any rate was awarded, a PhD from Bielefeld University in 2001, where I continued to work for several years. Among other things, I organized a conference on the environmental history of Nazi Germany for the German ministry for the environment and spent some time at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC in 2005.

I moved to Munich in 2006, helped by a generous Dilthey grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. I taught at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University and helped to build the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an institute for advanced studies in the environmental humanities run in collaboration by Munich University and the Deutsches Museum. It is during these years that I realized that environmental history, in addition to being an exciting field of historical scholarship, holds a huge potential for ongoing environmental debates. I also moved beyond my primary focus on German and U.S. history towards a more global perspective on the past. I joined Birmingham University in September 2013.

• Towards a Dead Planet? A History of Humans, Natural Resources, and the Environment (Spring term)
• The Age of Energy: Global Histories of Hope, Needs, and Carbon
• Before Brexit: Histories of European Integration, 1945-2016

I would be interested in supervising research in environmental history, broadly conceived.

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research interests go into different directions. One is the past and present of environmentalism. I have published a book about the Green Germany, which is a synthesis on German environmental history as well as a reflection on where environmentalism is standing in the twenty-first century. I continue to write and speak about environmental issues in Germany and beyond.

I am currently writing an environmental history of global modernity. How do we write a world history of human interaction with the natural world when all parameters come into flux: definitions of problems, priorities, allegiances, actors? And how do we write an environmental history of the world that speaks to the wider community of global historians? Environmental history should not just speak to itself, and this book seeks to demonstrate how environmental issues can help us writing global history.

Looking towards the future, I am building a research group on the global world of monoculture that seeks to understand why production systems all over the world, from coniferous forests in central Europe to soybeans in Brazil are tilting towards a reliance on a single crop during the modern era. The working argument is that there may be something akin to a “mind of monoculture,” which we can observe in very different societies all over the world.