Peter Engelke is a Visiting Fellow with Stimson’s Environmental Security Program, where he works at the intersection of urbanization, environment, and global security. The rapid growth of cities around the world is a dominant feature of development in the twenty-first century. Cities affect-and are affected by-nearly every aspect of the security nexus, including environmental, energy, human, and food security.
Dr. Engelke recently co-authored his second book (with John McNeill, forthcoming from Harvard University Press). The Early Anthropocene: Global Environmental History since 1945 (working title) stresses the scale and intensity of global environmental change during the postwar era. Dr. Engelke’s first book (Health and Community Design, with Lawrence Frank and Thomas Schmid, Island Press, 2003) was a study of the systematic relationships between public health, physical activity, and urban form.
In 2011, Dr. Engelke was awarded a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University, where he wrote his dissertation on the postwar origins of sustainable urbanism in Europe. He conducted his archival work abroad under a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) dissertation research grant. While at Georgetown, Dr. Engelke also received a Master’s degree from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. In addition, he possesses graduate degrees in Public Policy from the University of Maryland and Political Science from Indiana University.
From 1999 to 2003, Dr. Engelke was on the research faculty at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where he staffed a major research project linking urban development, public health, transportation, air quality, and environment in the metropolitan Atlanta region. In 1998-1999, he was a Fellow with the Robert Bosch Foundation in Germany, where he had the opportunity to work at the federal transport and environmental protection ministries and at the Deutscher Naturschutzring, an environmental NGO.
