Profile
Antoine Acker is an environmental historian working on global connections in the age of the Anthropocene, with a focus on transatlantic networks spanning between Latin America and Europe. At the Graduate Institute, he is leading the Eccellenza professorial project AntropoSouth: Latin American Oil Revolution in the Development Century. It studies the entwinement of energy and environmental topics in the process of nationalization of petroleum resources which accompanied the construction of post-colonial Latin American nation states and evaluates the impact of these transformations for energy transitions at a global level. In parallel, Acker is preparing a monograph on the role of history in global climate politics, and two co-edited volumes about the history of the Anthropocene in the Americas. Since 2013 he has taught classes and supervised student works in European, Global and Latin American history.
Activities
Antoine Acker has a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence (2014), and taught at the universities of Bielefeld (2013), Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle (2013-2014), La Rochelle (2014-2015), Maastricht (2015) and Zurich (2017-2021). He was also an invited fellow at the University of Bielefeld’s Center for InterAmerican Studies (2015), the Walter Benjamin Kolleg in Bern (2015-2016), the Center for the History of Global Development in Shanghai (2019), the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the Centre for Global History in Munich (2020-2021), as well as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at the University of Turin (2016-2017). His publications include Volkswagen in the Amazon: The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which received Honorable Mention for the Warren Dean Prize of the Conference on Latin American History, and “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Postcolonial Quest for Oil (1930-1975)” (Past & Present, 249(1)|2020), winner of the Latin American Studies Association’s Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize.