Adrián Lerner joined Freie Universität Berlin as a postdoc in Global History in 2021. He is a historian of cities, environmental history, the history of science, and Latin America. His current monograph, Jungle Cities: The Urbanization of Amazonia explores the parallel and divergent histories of Manaus (Brazil) and Iquitos (Peru), the crucial urban nodes of the Amazon rainforest. He is also working on two co-edited volumes: one about the links between capitalism and the formation of the ecological imagination in Peru (with Javier Puente, Smith College), and one about Peru from the perspective of global history (with Alberto Vergara, Universidad del Pacífico). He has also published widely on the histories of politics, international relations, gender, and public policy in Latin America. He has wide research interests in the history of Amazonia, the urbanization of the Global South, and, most recently, the rise of global infrastructure and business.

Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Adrián obtained his BA and Licenciatura at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He then moved to the United States, where he earned his MA, MPhil, and PhD in History from Yale University, where he was also a member of the inaugural cohort of the Interdisciplinary Concentration in the Humanities, focused on “The Technologies of Knowledge.” Before coming to Freie Universität Berlin, he was the Princeton Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment at Princeton University.

Winter 2021

- The Politics of Global History: The Question of Primacy (MA in Global History)

- Theory, Methodology and History of Historiography (BA in History)

Adrián’s current book project deals with social, political, and environmental change in a crucial region for the global ecosystem. The Amazon rainforest became an urban region during the twentieth century. Today, four out of every five of its inhabitants, some 30 million people, live in cities. Jungle Cities: The Urbanization of Amazonia, studies this process through the histories of its most important cities: Manaus (Brazil) and Iquitos (Peru). A comparative history, Jungle Cities documents a central tenet of the project of local, national, and transnational elites to create modernity: the attempt to overcome nature, and to displace the lifestyles and peoples associated with it. The social processes they unleashed, instead, revealed pervasive interactions between cities and jungle, the complex technical and scientific challenges they imposed, the agency of local peoples, and the combination of resilience and precariousness that characterized urban life in the rainforest. The boundary between metropolis and hinterland was never fixed. Since the advent of the steamship and the integration of Amazonia to global markets during the rubber boom of 1850-1920, elites and popular classes struggled to create stable built environments in the rainforest. After the boom, decades of economic stagnation turned even the achievement of basic infrastructure a formidable challenge. The manuscript explores the links between social inequalities and difficulties to control waterways, the defining ecological elements in the Amazon floodplain, between the origins of Amazonian urbanization and the 1960s, to reveal that the history of the cities and that of the rainforest formed single, entangled ecosystems, in which ecological and social processes were indistinguishable. By the 1960s, both Amazonian cities faced the combined pressures of explosive urban growth and the anxieties of the Cold War era. Military-led authoritarian governments in Brazil and Peru responded through radically different strategies, which the book explores through governmental policies towards similar, seasonally waterlogged informal neighborhoods in Manaus and Iquitos. Originally framed in familiar terms associated with transnational ideas about the urbanization of the Global South and stigmatized as cases of “environmental marginality”, policies ultimately differed because they were part of drastically different agendas towards Amazonia in Brazil and Peru. The hubris of the Brazilian generals contrasted with the reformism of their Peruvian counterparts.  In the 1970s, Iquitos remained organized around the management of social and environmental precariousness, with urban waters still a central issue, whereas Manaus became a “pole of development.” A demographic, commercial and industrial juggernaut, its influence reached far into the rainforest and, often tragically, it impacted the life of Brazil’s native peoples.

In addition to his work on Amazonian urbanization, which will also produce a series of spinoff articles, Adrián is working on two edited volumes about Peruvian history. The first, a collaboration with the historian Javier Puente, is a collection of essays about the links between capitalism and the geographic imagination in the country. The book shows how regional divisions assumed to reflect natural phenomena have been in fact related to the naturalization of capitalist relations, and how these ideas have in turn played a role in deepening specific capitalist formations. The second collection, co-edited with the political scientist Alberto Vergara, is an approach to Peruvian modern history and society through the prism of global history. Featuring more than 40 collaborations, the book will interrogate the ways key episodes of modern Peru have interacted with global processes.

Future research projects are related to Amazonian history in the longue durée, poor informal neighborhoods located in waterlogged spaces in cities across the Global South, and the history of telecommunications.

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