Prof. Dr. Philippe Forêt
LehrbeauftragterLehrbeauftragter
Seminar für Soziologie
Petersgraben 27
4051
Basel
Schweiz
Curriculum Vitae
My publications and teaching have connected two types of interactions in the geography of knowledge: nature and culture in Asia, and fieldwork and review processes in the environmental sciences. I serve with Prof. Max Bergman as Co-Director of the Social Transitions Research Group in the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Basel. I am also a member of the Society of Fellows of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and of the new BRIDGES UNESCO Management of Social Transformations program on sustainability. The Research Group of the Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (SAGUF) that I lead with Profs. Christoph Kueffer and Marc Hall has promoted transformational research on collapse and recovery. We have facilitated the emergence of the environmental humanities in Switzerland, which is a field that I have sought to develop outside the Global North. I have held positions in various institutions from Peking University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich and Ludwig-Maximilians University. The Swedish Collegium and the Institute of Advanced Studies of Nantes have both elected me Fellow. I owe to a fellowship from Harvard my first book (Mapping Chengde. The Qing landscape Enterprise / 图解承德 — 清代的造园工程), which Fudan University Press in Shanghai will issue in a new edition. My next book (A Documented Negative Outcome. How Geographers Immobilized the Past Climate of Asia) should be published by the University of Chicago Press.