Oliver Lucier

I am a PhD candidate in the History of Science & Medicine Program at Yale University. Broadly my research is focused on two overlapping questions: what is the historical relationship between environmental science and policy? And what role have American environmental experts played in shaping the global environment? In my dissertation, “Re-Covering the Earth: American Biospheric Scientists and Global Land Use Policy in the Twentieth Century,” I argue that American scientists studying the relationship between plants, society, and the climate—what I call “biospheric science”—reshaped both popular understandings and the scientific management of three of the largest and most contested land cover changes of the twentieth century: desertification, the expansion of cultivated land, and tropical deforestation.

My recent article based on my dissertation research, “Climate Conscious: Holdridge Life Zones and Caribbean Commodities,” was published in Isis and received the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for best essay on the history of science by a graduate student. At Yale I have designed and taught an upper-level undergraduate history seminar on the intertwined histories of colonialism, capitalism, and climate science, served as a McDougal Teaching Fellow, and organized an interdisciplinary workshop on the Interactions of Climate and Life.

Before arriving at Yale, I graduated from Rice University with a BA in History with Honors and a BS in Earth Science and from Durham University with an MA in Geography with Distinction.