Antoine Acker

Antoine Acker is an environmental historian researching the place of Latin America in the history of the Anthropocene and a professor at the University of Geneva (UNIGE). Doctor of the European University Institute of Florence, he taught at the universities of Bielefeld, Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, La Rochelle, Maastricht, Zurich, and was an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID, Geneva). He was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Turin and a guest researcher at the universities of Bern, Munich (LMU, Rachel Carson Center and Munich Centre for Global History) and Shanghai (SHU). He leads the project “AnthropoSouth: Latin American Oil Revolutions in the Development Century” (Eccellenza grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation), which explores Latin American energy revolutions from a transnational perspective, and coordinates “Lost Cities” together with Danielle Heberle Vargas and Patricia Vieira -a collaborative project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, on the legacy of urban utopias in the Amazon region. He is an affiliated researcher of the Centro Maria Sibylla Merian de Estudios Latinoamericanos Avanzados (CALAS, Guadalajara/Bielefeld/Buenos Aires/Quito/San José) and the Rachel Carson Center (RCC, Munich). His publications include Volkswagen in the Amazon: The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2017, honorable mention Warren Dean Award for Best Brazilian History Book) and “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post- colonial Quest for Oil (1930-1975)” (Past & Present, 249(1)|2020), winner of the Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda prize from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).