Lesley Green, PhD

Prof. Lesley Green is the founding director of Environmental Humanities South, an accredited research centre attached to the University of Cape Town, where she is Professor of Anthropology. 

A former Fulbright Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Mandela Fellow at Harvard, and Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, her research focuses on understanding and strengthening justice-based environmental governance in Southern Africa. 

She is currently a Cheney Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, hosted by the Global Food and Environment Institute, where her task is to build stronger social science engagement with earth and life sciences, so that environmental governance can be improved. 

She is the editor of Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC, 2013), co-author of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World (Arizona, 2013), author of Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa (Duke University Press / Wits University Press, 2020), and co-lead on the transdisciplinary Water Stories website that aims to share research and increase public understanding of water pollution: www.waterstories.co.za