BIO
Thom van Dooren is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney (Australia). From 2024, he is also a Humboldt Research Award funded Fellow at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) research hub at the University of Cologne (Germany).
Holder of a PhD from the Australian National University, from 2011 to 2017 he helped to establish and then worked with the Environmental Humanities group at the University of New South Wales, home to Australia’s (and one of the world’s) first undergraduate degrees in the environmental humanities, before moving to the University of Sydney in 2018.
He is the author of three of the past decade’s most highly cited books in the environmental humanities: Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2019) and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022). All three titles have been translated into French, with some available in Japanese, Italian and Chinese.
His lead role in shaping the environmental humanities as a field of scholarship is evidenced by his role as founding co-editor of Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press) in 2012, the first international learned journal devoted entirely to research in this emerging multidisciplinary field, which he co-edited up to 2020.