Dan Zimmer

Dan Zimmer is a lecturer with the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program at Stanford University. His scholarship draws on ecological political theory, the history of political thought, and science and technology studies to explore how humans came to exert power on a planetary scale and the political implications this carries. Zimmer teaches courses such as “The Science and Politics of the Apocalypse” and “Earth, Space, Bits: Contesting the Nature and Future of Humanity.”

His research explores the connections that bind nuclear weapons, planetary ecological crises, and the rise of artificial intelligence into a broader syndrome. Recent projects have addressed the politics of Earth System science, the relationship between existential risk and biopower, how learning to live with nuclear terror affects the  response to global warming, how nuclear and ecological anxieties have shaped understandings of AI risk, the need for greater diversity and pluralism in the field of existential risk studies, and a history of how the human power to destroy all human life reshaped Western political thought during the 20th century.