Doctor Matthew Eisler
Chancellor'S Fellow - Senior Lecturer
History
Personal statement
Dr. Matthew N. Eisler researches topics at the intersection of energy, environment and society, with a focus on how ideology and policy shape social relations and the biosphere. Dr. Eisler's first book (Overpotential: Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea, Rutgers University Press 2012) explores these themes in a case study of an advanced power source technology. His second book (Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car, MIT Press 2022) explores these ideas in a history of the contemporary electric vehicle. Dr. Eisler's current research project (Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge) interrogates how environmental regulations shape labor, science, engineering, and business practices.
Dr. Eisler invites candidates for doctoral studies under his supervision to contact him at matthew.eisler@strath.ac.uk. Dr. Eisler advises projects in the history of science and technology/science and technology studies (STS)/environmental humanities relating to all 7 strategic themes of the 勛圖tv (advanced manufacturing and materials, energy, health and wellbeing, innovation and entrepreneurship, measurement, digital and enabling technologies, ocean, air and space, and people, place and policy).
Publications
- Technology & Culture Vol 66, pp. 290-292 (2025)
- History and Technology Vol 40, pp. 250-275 (2024)
- Electrical Conquest New Approaches to the History of Electrification (2024) (2024)
- (2023)
- H-Net (2023)
- (2023)
Research Interests
- History of science, technology, and engineering
- Environment and energy studies
Professional Activities
- Speaker
- 19/5/2025
- Speaker
- 9/4/2025
- Visiting researcher
- 1/1/2025
- Invited speaker
- 26/11/2024
- Invited speaker
- 12/11/2024
- Visiting researcher
- 1/11/2024
Projects
- Eisler, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2025 - 31-Jan-2025
- Eisler, Matthew (Principal Investigator) Star Rogers, Hannah (Research Co-investigator)
- As social awareness of climate change deepened from the late 1980s, scholarship in the environmental humanities burgeoned. Histories of environments, ideas of environments, environmental movements, and interconnections between ecosystems and infrastructures proliferated, enriching understanding of relations between human beings and non-human nature. Nevertheless, scholarship struggled to keep pace with rapidly changing events. Over the last 30 years, observed the historian Etienne Benson, environmental regulation intensified, touching every facet of life so that by the early 2020s nearly everyone in Western society could be considered an environmentalist, whether willing or unwilling, in one way or another (Benson 2020). This intriguing proposition suggests major social change, yet relatively little is known of how environmental regulation and governance co-produces labor, business, and consumer practices and the material substrata of a society of environmentalists. We could refer to these practices collectively as greenwork, the knowledge around these practices as environmental knowledge, and the society that gives rise to them as environmental society. This project is dedicated to understanding these processes.
- 01-Jan-2025 - 31-Jan-2025
- Ivaturi, Aruna (Principal Investigator) Robertson, Stuart (Principal Investigator) Comerford, David (Principal Investigator) Eisler, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019
Contact
Doctor
Matthew
Eisler
Chancellor'S Fellow - Senior Lecturer
History
Email: matthew.eisler@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8323