Lachlan Fleetwood - global dis:connect

the centre
- The Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, investigates globalisation as a dynamic process shaped by the interplay of integration, disconnection, and disintegration. Our work focuses on understanding how connections emerge, fail, or remain absent, in both historical and contemporary contexts.
- the centre
research
- global dis:connect approaches globalisation through the lens of dis:connectivity, focusing on absences, detours and interruptions that shape historical and contemporary global processes. Rather than assuming linear integration, we examine the gaps, delays and disruptions that make globalisation uneven and socially significant.
  
  Our research is structured around six key areas – absences, detours, interruptions, laboratories, cultural infrastructures and temporalities – which foster interdisciplinary dialogue without normative assumptions or claims of completeness.
- research
fellows
- The cornerstone of global dis:connect is the fellowship programme, in which approximately ten scholars come to Munich each year. They research dis:connectivity on site and in close contact with the directors and their peers. Fellows also have the opportunity to host workshops on the topics of their research.
- fellows
events
- Here is where to find out about coming events, new publications, press releases and other news from global dis:connect.
- events
outreach
- At global dis:connect, research is meant to circulate. Through publications, media formats and artist events, we connect academic research with public debate and artistic perspectives.
- outreach
  - gd:c blog
  - static
  - podcast
- global dis:connect publishes innovative interventions on dis:connectivity across a range of media, from the blog, which covers the latest news, research and art at gd:c, to static, a periodical containing the best work from within and beyond global dis:connect, in addition to traditional scholarly formats.
- publications
  - aperiodic open-access publications

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Lachlan Fleetwood

Lachlan is a historian of science, empire, geography and environment. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University and has subsequently held research fellowships at University College Dublin, Yale and the LMU Munich. His first book, Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya appeared in 2022. He has recently written about scientific and cultural idea of habitability in relation to imperial geography and the ‘lost cities’ of the Silk Roads, including for WIREs Climate Change and Environment and History.

Lachlan joined global dis:connect as a joint fellow with the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE).

Environmental determinism and its imperial legacies: geography, terraforming and climate change in Mesopotamia 1780-1920

This project traces British, French and German imperial interference in Mesopotamia from 1780 to 1920. Here imperial geography was haunted by a tension between the ideas that environments shaped people and that people might escape environmental constraints via technological mastery. Applying interdisciplinary insights, this research asks: why have insidious environmentally determinist explanations so often appealed to empires, and how do these imperial legacies matter today as large-scale climate engineering schemes are being proposed?

Have a look at Lachlan’s research poster about his project.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Lachlan and HERE for a list of his publications.