Paul G. Nauert

Paul is a PhD candidate researching questions of power, justice, and environmental change in the modern world from the local to the planetary scale. Paul’s dissertation and first book project examine how choices of U.S. foreign policymakers in the mid-twentieth century shaped long-term trajectories of anthropogenic climate change and the geopolitics of climate (in)justice. He explores this story through a comparative study of American decisions on industrialization and resource use in the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan.

Some of Paul's other research traces connections among patterns of labor, land use, commodities, community, race, and gender in the twentieth-century United States and the wider Pacific world. Topics include the role of Asian American and Asian diasporic networks in early twentieth-century Californian floriculture, the role of women in the late twentieth-century U.S. wine industry, and American bioprospecting in early twentieth-century China. His award-winning teaching experience has engaged themes in modern American, Japanese, Southeast Asian, and transnational history as well as the ethics of war and climate justice.

Paul is a co-founder and co-lead of the Stanford Environmental and Climate History Workshop, a co-organizer of Queer@EH (a network of LGBTQA+ identifying environmental humanities scholars in the U.S. and beyond), a member of the Environmental Historians Action Collaborative, and is supporting efforts to ground sustainability research in climate justice values at Stanford and Harvard.

You can learn more about Paul's work at www.paulnauert.com.