Lesley Green is a professor of Anthropology and co-founder of Environmental Humanities South (EHS) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She currently serves as EHS director, leading its curriculum innovation to develop transdisciplinary and African environmental scholarship. Now in its ninth year, EHS has hosted students from nineteen African countries and supports the emergence of African ecopolitics.
A former Fulbright Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Mandela Fellow at Harvard; Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian, and Cheney Fellow at the University of Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment, her research focuses on justice-based environmental governance sciences in Southern Africa. A particular interest is in the relationship between science and democracy in the global south where there are contests over knowledge. As a former council member of the Society for Social Studies of Science, she is active in global science studies dialogues and was recently awarded a US4M, four-year grant by Science For Africa, for a six-country project along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, to develop an African critical zone social science scholarship, in partnership with South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council.
She is the editor of Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC, 2013), co-author of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World (Arizona, 2013), and author of Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa (Duke / Wits, 2020) which won the Humanities Book Prize awarded by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2023. A forthcoming collection titled Contested Ecologies 2: African Ecopolitics of Dignity and Desire (co-edited by Lesley Green, Frank Matose, Anselmo Matusse, Nikiwe Solomon) will be out in 2023/2024.
