I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia.
I am a core faculty member of UGA’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Integrative Conservation Research, and co-director of the Brazil Natural Resource Governance Initiative. I am also affiliated with the Sustainability Certificate Program and the Certificate in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies.
My research examines the political ecology and political economy of development, global environmental governance, and agrarian politics. I approach this work from a deeply interdisciplinary perspective, drawing especially on geography, anthropology, environmental sociology, ecological history, and conservation science. I also have a special interest in comparative and ethnographic methodology, and regional focuses in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
I received my PhD in Government from Cornell University (2017), and I hold an MA from Cornell University (2014) and a BA from Yale University (2007). Prior to beginning my PhD, I was a UNESCO-Fulbright Fellow with UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme, a Fulbright Grantee in Ecuador, and an apprentice on an organic, community-supported farm in my home state of Maine.
Through my work, I seek to take part in a community of people who recognize that human well-being is inseparable from ecological relationships, and who strive to develop responses to a socially and ecologically unjust global system.
Gregory M. Thaler 