Thomas Lekan

Background

About Thomas Lekan

I am a university professor with over 25 years of teaching, research, and administrative experience. At South Carolina, I split my undergraduate and graduate teaching responsibilities between classes in modern European history and courses in environmental studies. I was honored to be a recipient of the Golden Key Award for the Creative Integration of Research and Teaching in 2005 and the Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2015. My research examines European environmental history and the legacies of green imperialism in East Africa, particularly the frictions between global and local wildlife conservation and the uneven effects of tourism as a lever of sustainable development during the decades of decolonization and early independence (ca. In 2020, I published "Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti"(Oxford, 2020), which won the German Studies Association/DAAD Book Prize for History and the Social Sciences in 2021. I am currently working on two book projects. With the support of a National Humanities Center Fellowship for academic year 2022-23, I have begun drafting “Conservation by Slaughter: African Game Ranching and the Perils of Sustainable Development." This book is the first history of a now largely forgotten IUCN/FAO effort to integrate soil conservation and agricultural development by “cropping” African game animals for bushmeat. My research casts doubt on market-based conservation schemes to make “pay for themselves” by showing how eco-development projects undermined pastoralist communities’ existing dietary relationships with livestock, wild animals, and other non-human life. With political scientist Dr. Carol Hager of Bryn Mawr College, I am also working on "Green Germany: The Local Politics of Global Sustainability," which focuses on Germany’s uneven quest to create a sustainable industrial society by shifting to renewable energy, promoting public transportation and green infrastructure, developing sustained-yield forestry, and expanding urban green spaces and rural nature parks. We argue that Germany’s sustainability strategies emerged from local networks of tinkerers and grassroots activists rather than state bureaucrats’ top-down initiatives. Our proposal for this project is under review with Cambridge University Press.