Oliver Lazarus

Research Interests: Environmental history; history of capitalism; history of U.S. empire; animal history; history of technology; economic history; urban history; STS; the Anthropocene.

Oliver Lazarus is a PhD candidate in the History of Science Department. He is a historian of the modern U.S. in the world, specializing in histories of the environment, science, and capitalism. He is particularly interested in how the production of knowledge about and the manipulation of the nonhuman world has been shaped by and also shapes processes of American state formation and capital accumulation both at home and abroad. His dissertation, “Domesticating Empire: American Power and the Industrialization of Life,” explores how the U.S. government promoted the global cultivation of specific domestic animal forms, along with the infrastructure to support them, to advance agricultural and foreign policy interests throughout the long twentieth century. His M.A. thesis focused on the Great Epizootic, a horse influenza originating in North America in 1872 that effectively halted daily life in New York City for weeks, revealing how the construction of industrial urban capitalism was carried out by and through a concomitant industrialization of nonhuman life. 

In Fall 2026, he will join the faculty of University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor of 20th-Century American Environmental History.

Previous Degrees:

M.A., Animal Studies, New York University
B.A., International and Area Studies, Washington University in St. Louis