Kyle Harper, University of Oklahoma professor of classics and letters, has been elected to hold the annual chair of the Collège de France’s Avenir Commun Durable (Sustainable Common Future) for 2023-24. Harper will be the third holder of the chair for this interdisciplinary project focused on addressing the challenge of climate change.
Founded in 1530, the Collège de France is considered France’s most prestigious research establishment. As of 2021, 21 Nobel Prize winners and nine Fields Medalists have been affiliated with the Collège de France. The Collège welcomes international experts every year to highlight current research addressing the challenges of the global environmental and energy transition.
As the annual chair, Harper will give nine public lectures and organize nine seminars and a colloquium. He will draw on his past and ongoing research focusing on the resilience and vulnerability of past societies faced with climate change. Harper’s lectures will focus on climate change in human history and what we can learn from the past record of how human societies respond to climate change as we face current and future challenges.
Harper, who is also a Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, is a historian whose work attempts to integrate the natural sciences into the study of the human past. His main research includes the history of infectious diseases and climate change and their impact on human societies. More broadly, he writes about the history of humans as agents of ecological change and explores how issues such as biodiversity, health and sustainability can be approached from a historical perspective. He is the author of four books, including Slavery in the Late Roman World, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History and The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, the last of which has been translated into 12 languages, including French. His next book, The Last Animal, is a story of human impact on global biodiversity from the origins of our species to the present day. Harper has been honored by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Dumbarton Oaks Institute.
