Biographical Summary

Steven McClellan is a historian of knowledge, the environment, and empire. He is a 2025 Long-Term Fellow at the German Historical Institute. Steven completed his dissertation in the fall of 2022 at the University of Toronto, which is an institutional history of the Verein für Sozialpolitik. His work explores how social scientists defined, understood, and sometimes denied the deep connections between politics, the state, the economy, and academic knowledge. Currently, Steven is examining the intersections of Germany’s bird conservation movement, the rise of scientific ornithology, and the hobby of birdwatching, particularly as these related to imperial and transnational networks of actors.