Lake Preston-Self

Lake Preston-Self is an American environmental and diplomatic historian, Walbolt Fellow at Florida State University, and a scholar of oceanic and maritime history. His research focuses on the intersection of high-modernist grand strategies, water resources policy, marine science, and resource extraction in maritime borderlands across the 20th-century world. He is especially interested in U.S. foreign relations with post-revolutionary Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean, the environmental and intellectual history of the Tricontinental and the Global South, and the broader interplay of empire, revolution, oil geopolitics, and Indigenous diplomacy in natural and built environments across the Americas. His emerging dissertation — tentatively titled, “The Unbound Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in the Age of American Empire” — is set to become the first ever comprehensive diplomatic history of the 20th-century Gulf of Mexico. In April 2025, Lake co-organized the panel, “Science, Space, and Place: New Environmental Histories of the Cold War,” at the 2025 American Society for Environmental History Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bringing together scholars from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, American Institute of Physics, and Stanford University to discuss new paradigms for integrating the fields of diplomatic and environmental history in a Cold War context. Later that summer, he served as the lead organizer for the global symposium, “Visions of Modernity: Ideology, Science, and Strategy in the Global Cold War,” representing four nations (India, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and five institutions (the Smithsonian, the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Manchester, Shiv Nadar University, and Florida State University) at the 2025 International Congress of the History of Science and Technology (ICHST) in Dunedin, New Zealand. At FSU, Lake has been a two-time Dean’s Doctoral Scholar in the College of Arts & Sciences (2023-2024, 2024-2025), as well as a recipient of the Granville L. Larimore Endowment for Excellence in Arts and Sciences (2025-2026). In 2025, he was the inaugural scholar to be awarded the Department of History’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Fellowship, which allowed him to launch his archival research and landscape analysis related to the 20th-century Gulf of Mexico. He holds a B.A. in History from Lee University—a private liberal arts college in his hometown of Cleveland, TN, as well as an M.A. in History—with concentrations in U.S. foreign policy, the history of science & technology, and global environmental history—from Florida State University.