Jake Kosek is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his doctorate in geography from UC Berkeley in 2002 and a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1995. After completing his PhD, he held the Lang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, where he also lectured in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. He subsequently received the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley before joining the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor in American Studies and Anthropology. He later returned to Berkeley to join the Department of Geography.
Kosek is coauthor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (Duke, 2003), which examines the intersections of critical theories of race and nature, and author of Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke, 2006), an ethnography of cultural politics, race, and nation amid struggles over forests in the Southwest. Understories received the John Hope Franklin Book Award for Best Book in American Studies. More recently, he is coauthor of Fear of a Dead White Planet (Duke, 2025), which traces how planetary technofixes and environmental emergency discourses are entangled with long-standing projects of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemic violence. He is currently completing Homoapiens: A Critical Natural History of the Modern Honeybee, which explores natural history as both an object of critical inquiry and a conceptual tool for remaking modern natures (Duke, 2026).
His fields of interest lie at the intersection of nature, science, and empire. Drawing on critical theory, postcolonial studies, biopolitics, and science and technology studies, his work develops new approaches to political geography, aiming to reimagine and terraform alternative political and ecological futures.
