David G. Angeler
Research Professor |
David, trained as a freshwater ecologist, he now works across resilience science, complexity theory, the philosophy of science, and the arts, on a body of work increasingly organized less by discipline than by a set of recurring problems: how complex systems hold together, how they come apart, and what it means for a system — ecological or social — to revise its own premises.
His path through the field has been less a steady progression than a series of departures. After a doctorate in Natural Sciences from the University of Vienna (1998) and early work in aquatic ecology, he moved into resilience science during more than a decade at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, contributing to the study of regime shifts, adaptive capacity, and transformation in social-ecological systems. More recently his work has turned philosophical, toward the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ecological theory itself. He has held positions in Austria, Spain, and Sweden, and is Adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Honorary Fellow at Deakin University, Australia. His current research asks how ecological theory might be reconstructed for the Anthropocene. This includes a constraint-based ontology for ecology alongside work on rupture and transformation in complex adaptive systems, the limits of representation in ecological inference, and the recursive dynamics by which systems become trapped in, or break out of, their own logic. He also writes literary fiction and poetry, including the haiku collection Elation and Despair, which he treats as continuous with the science rather than a diversion from it. |