Lucas Bessire

Lucas Bessire is an American writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. His research explores the lived experiences and political ecologies of natural resource frontiers across the Americas. Drawing on fieldwork in the Gran Chaco, the Arctic and the High Plains, his writing crosses genres to engage contemporary environmental issues and communicate his findings to wider publics. A fifth-generation Kansan, Lucas has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow of both Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, he is the author of the award-winning ethnography Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press 2014), and Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press 2021), which won several prizes and was named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction.