Matt Varco joined Trier in October 2024, after completing a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. He was previously based in Berlin and Erfurt in 2022 for his doctoral fieldwork, and at Universität Osnabrück for an Erasmus placement in 2017-18.

Matt’s doctoral project was titled ‘Political ecologies of the German Far-right’, and focused on the significance of nature within the history of German-speaking right-wing politics, as a symbolic, ideological and material terrain. The project was inspired by wide-reaching debates within critical geography, drawing on ideas from affect theory, embodied geopolitics, biopolitics, articulation theory, and decolonial thought. His historical analysis focuses on the connections between environmentalism and Germany’s sociopolitical modernisation in the Kaiserreich period. It also picks up on contemporary issues in Germany, particularly around uneven regional development, post-reunification culture and society, and the sustained electoral successes of right-wing populism

Matt’s postdoctoral project is provisionally titled ‘Fascist future-making and authoritarian affinities in the racial anthropocene’, and aims to understand the increasingly complex ways that the global right is interpreting and responding to conditions of socio-ecological collapse.

Matt works mainly with qualitative methods, specialising in archival, ethnographic, textual and visual forms of enquiry. He is interested in the ethics of these forms of geographical research, particularly as they relate to encounters with evil, authoritarianism, and hate. Matt’s teaching is guided by these interests and commitments around politics, ethics, and history, and he enjoys critical discussions around these themes.