Research 

I am interested in what people do when the systems they rely upon stop working. Whether speaking of the end of political systems like communism, infrastructural systems like the electric grid, economic systems like whaling, energetic systems like fossil fuels, or cultural systems like the contemporary university what unites my work is an abiding concern for both the inventive creativity and the normative impulses that systemic collapse begets. What is the nature of renewal, I ask, and what do people, diversely, make of things when all that is solid fades into air.

 Currently 

Gretchen Bakke was awarded a Heisenberg Research Position in 2022; she splits her time between the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University, Berlin and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. She is also a member of the Anthropocene Formations Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science also in Berlin.

Her e-mail address is bakke@uchicago.edu

 CV 

Click here.

 Speaking Engagements 

For speaking engagements, represented by: Bright Sight Group.