Dr Gustav Cederlöf is Lecturer in Liberal Arts & Geography at King’s College London. He joined King’s in 2013, first completing his PhD on the political economy of energy transitions and Cuban energy history. He has a BA in Development Studies from Uppsala University and an MSc in Human Ecology from Lund University. Gustav has previously been ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, leading the research project ‘Energy Revolution’, and has taught political ecology and international development at King’s College London and the London School of Economics.

Gustav’s research experience includes long-term ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Cuba, as well as participatory and other qualitative research in India, Sweden, and the UK. His work has appeared in leading geography and development studies journals including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, and Journal of Latin American Studies. The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography have awarded him for his research.

Gustav’s research focuses on the political, economic, and social roles of energy and infrastructure in society. He is particularly interested in postcolonial and non-capitalist perspectives on fossil-fuel dependence and low-carbon production systems, and he has regional expertise in Cuban and Latin American studies. In the early 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Cuba lost more than 85 percent of its oil supplies; a historical experience providing key insights on the socio-ecological complexity of fossil-fuel dependence and energy transitions.

• Political ecology
• Energy use and energy transitions
• Ethnography of infrastructure
• Low-carbon production systems, incl. agroecology
• Cuba, Latin America, state-socialism