معرفی
Paul K. Gellert is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Earth & Environmental Sciences program of the CUNY Graduate Center (Spring 2025). He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998 and has focused on Indonesia for over two decades, combining fieldwork with historical analysis.
- Current Positions: Professor, University of Tennessee; Visiting Research Scholar, CUNY Graduate Center
- Expertise: Environmental sociology, political economy of natural resources, global coal dynamics, ecologically unequal exchange, world-systems theory
His research explores the dialectical relationship between society and nature through case studies on palm oil, coal, and timber industries. Collaborating with Paul S. Ciccantell, he analyzes coal's persistence in capitalist systems. The 15 most recent articles highlight themes of resource frontiers, climate obstruction, extractive peripheries, and long-term commodity cycles. His methodological approach merges structural fieldwork with world-historical analysis, emphasizing processes like financialization and accumulation by dispossession.
Current projects include a book manuscript on Indonesia’s century-long natural resource dependency and critical assessments of energy transition narratives. His work challenges teleological assumptions about coal’s decline and examines transnational environmental justice frameworks through commodity chain and ecological exchange lenses.
