Dr Matthew Eisler
Strathclyde Chancellor's Fellow
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 University of Strathclyde (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
- From petroleum to power sources : Big Oil and the technopolitics of energy conversion
- Eisler Matthew N
- History and Technology Vol 40, pp. 250-275 (2024)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2024.2402581
- Vehicle-to-grid, regulated deregulation, and the energy conversion imaginary
- Eisler Matthew N
- Electrical Conquest New Approaches to the History of Electrification (2024) (2024)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44591-0_9
- Why Can’t Anyone But Tesla Make a Buck on EVs? Thank 20 Years of Public Policy.
- Eisler Matthew
- (2023)
- [Book review]: Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future : Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. xv + 234 pp. $34.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-295-75024-8.
- Eisler Matthew N
- (2023)
- Book review : James Morton Turner. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. xv + 234 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-75024-8
- Eisler Matthew
- (2023)
- False starts : the story of vehicle-to-grid power
- Eisler Matthew N
- (2023)
Research Interests
- Environment and energy studies
- History of science, technology, and engineering
Professional Activities
- RWTH Aachen University
- Visiting researcher
- 1/1/2025
- Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge
- Invited speaker
- 12/11/2024
- University of Copenhagen
- Visiting researcher
- 1/11/2024
- 2024 quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
- Speaker
- 7/2024
- Automaking in the Age of Climate Crisis
- Speaker
- 25/4/2024
- Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car
- Speaker
- 19/2/2024
Projects
- Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge
- 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-Dec-2025
- Centre for Interdisciplinary Sustainable Practices of Research in Energy (C-INSPRE) - Strathclyde CDT
- Ivaturi, Aruna (Principal Investigator) Robertson, Stuart (Principal Investigator) Comerford, David (Principal Investigator) Eisler, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- Strathclyde Centre for Doctoral Training (https://www.strath.ac.uk/research/c-inspre/) - £332,658.0
- 01-Jul-2019
Contact
Dr
Matthew
Eisler
Strathclyde Chancellor's Fellow
History
Email: matthew.eisler@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8323