Peter Klein is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard College.
His broad interests are in environmental sociology, international development, and political sociology. His dissertation research focused on state-society relations, social mobilization, and the contested notions of development that emerge around the construction of the Belo Monte dam near Altamira, Brazil. In another project (with Dr. Leah VanWey), also based in the Brazilian Amazon, he used survey data to explore land use change, social organization participation and land rights, and migration. A third project (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, and Stephanie Savell) explored Civic Imagination, or the ways in which groups creatively think about a better society, in Providence, RI. After completing a year of group, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, they published a book, Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life
In addition to his research projects, Peter taught in the Global Studies program at Providence College and a course on spatial demography at Universidade Estadual de Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil.
