Presentation by 2022-23 Humanities Center Fellow Paul Nauert

"Climate Crucible: American Choices in Germany, Japan, and the Making of the Great Acceleration, 1939-1953"
Nauert’s current project presents a new interpretation of American responsibility in shaping trajectories of climate change and the planetary politics of climate (in)justice at a pivotal moment of the mid-twentieth century. He approaches this story through comparative study of American debates and decisions on industrialization, resource use, and reparations policy in the post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan. Combining sources from U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence archives with economic and environmental data, Nauert bridges historiography of the U.S. in the twentieth-century world and environmental humanities scholarship while illuminating roots of twenty-first century challenges in the geopolitics of climate justice. You can learn more about Paul’s research, teaching, and community-focused work at paulnauert.com.
About the Speaker
Paul Nauert is a queer historian, teacher, and community-builder. A history PhD candidate at Stanford, he engages questions of power, justice, and socio-environmental change from the local to the planetary scale over the twentieth century, including work on U.S. foreign policy, climate, labor, commodities, race, gender, and class.