Lachlan Summers

Lachlan Summers studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he received his PhD in 2023. His dissertation, “Mexico City Is Two Hours from Mexico City,” examined the relationship between geological time and national history by researching the political, emotional, and health fallout of an earthquake that struck Mexico City in 2017—which happened on the same date as the most devastating earthquake in the city’s history. While finishing his dissertation, he was an INTPART Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and prior to his PhD he taught at the University of Melbourne. Lachlan’s current research project examines the emergence of Mexico’s seismometer network at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing upon the practical work that Mexican earthquake engineers undertook to coordinate their scientific work with the emergent international order of universal time. At MPIWG, he is a member of the “Historicizing Deep Time” Working Group. Alongside academic writing, Lachlan publishes creative non-fiction and essays that are adjacent to his research that have won recognitions from Longreads and the LA Press Club.