DoctorAlessandro Antonello

I am associate professor in environmental history and UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment and Heritage in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. I am also currently Head of Program for History and Classics.

Before joining the University of Tasmania in January 2025, I was senior research fellow in history at Flinders University, Adelaide-Kaurna Yerta (2020–24), a British Academy Visiting Fellow (2023), a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne (2016–19), and a US National Science Foundation-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oregon (2014–16). I received my PhD from the Australian National University in 2014.

Research Interests and Projects

My research investigates the histories of Australia’s marine and coastal environments, Antarctic environmental knowledge and geopolitics, the cryosphere, and the world ocean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I work predominantly in the fields of environmental history and history of science, with some work in international history and interdisciplinary collaborations too. Among my publications, my major work to date is my book The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment (Oxford University Press, 2019), which revealed how the interplay of geopolitics, environmentalism and scientific research shaped the Antarctic Treaty System’s turn to environmental protection and management in the 1960s and 1970s.

My current projects include:

The value of seagrass: extraction, protection, territory and community at Australia’s coasts. This project explores the diverse uses and knowledges of seagrasses in Australian history from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. It investigates the varying values ascribed to seagrasses across the past 125 years, from its potential as a commodifiable fibre, its uses in buildings, its functions in marine ecosystems, as a subject of community concern, and, more recently, as part of carbon accounting systems as ‘blue carbon’ in the era of climate change. My research on the history of seagrass extraction in South Australia in the early twentieth century contributed to the development of Crosscurrents, an exhibition of new art at the Flinders University Museum of Art, in 2025.

Our Blue Backyard: A History of Australian Cities and Marine Environments. This project, generously supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council, investigates environmental and cultural relationships between Australia’s coastal cities and their nearshore marine and coastal environments from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through diverse archival and material sources, it explores how urban communities and institutions have developed knowledge, policies, and practices around their dynamic ‘blue backyards’. The project is also interested in exploring a larger discussion about an ‘urban blue humanities’ globally. Study sites include Gulf St Vincent, Moreton Bay, and Westernport Bay.

Antipodean Geology: A Modern History of Southern Hemisphere Earth. Led by my colleague Prof. Alison Bashford along with Dr Jarrod Hore at UNSW, this project explores the modern history of the ancient mega-continent Gondwanaland. We aim to reorient the history of geosciences towards the southern hemisphere by investigating geologists working in Australasia, South Asia, South America, Southern Africa and Antarctica since 1788. We also investigate what ‘Gondwana’ and other deep geological time ideas mean for societies across the southern hemisphere. For an essay on the place of Gondwanaland in twentieth-century Antarctic history, see my essay “The face of the Earth at the end of the world: Fragments of Gondwanaland” in Griffith Review (2022).

Antarctic and Southern Ocean environmental ideas and governance. I retain a continuing interest in the history and contemporary geopolitics of environmental ideas, scientific practices and governance in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. My research has investigated the development of environmental ideas and protection practices in the Antarctic Treaty System since the treaty’s signature in 1959. My major work is my book The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment (Oxford University Press, 2019), which revealed how the interplay of geopolitics, environmentalism and scientific research shaped the Antarctic Treaty System’s turn to environmental protection and management in the 1960s and 1970s. In various publications I have explored diverse subjects, including: how ideas and practices around environmental impact assessment arrived in Antarctica in the 1970s; how krill populations were imagined and studied in the 1950s and 1960s; the Southern Ocean in the Australian cultural imagination; the long history of environmental governance in the polar regions; the concept of ‘place’ and the spatial politics of Antarctica; Australia’s participation in the International Geophysical Year in Antarctica; and studies of Antarctica’s Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora.

Histories of cryosphere knowledge and cultures. With Mark Carey at the University of Oregon, I previously worked on the history of ideas and cultures around glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice (collectively known as the cryosphere). Outcomes of that research included: an exploration of the part of ice cores in imaginings of the global environment; a critical exploration of gendered knowledge production around glaciers; a history of environmental imaginaries and practices on the Antarctic ice sheet; a history of Australian scientific work on the Antarctic ice sheet; the contemporary geopolitics of Antarctic ice; more recently, an exploration of the cinema of ice and cryosphere in the early twentieth century, taking in films from Antarctica, the Arctic and the Himalaya in the early 1920s.

In addition to large research projects, I have contributed to diverse scholarly areas and questions, including: methodological questions in the posthumanities, including creative collaborations; the history of Captain Cook memorialisation and the geopolitical aspects of monuments; the participation of environmental historians in public policy and governance; the history of exploration in the twentieth century; and the question of plastic in the archaeological record.

PhD, Masters and Honours Supervision

I am eager to supervise research students (PhD and masters) and honours students in a wide range of subjects across environmental history, the environmental humanities and posthumanities, history of science, and international history. Prospective students are welcome to contact me directly.

Scholarly Service

Current service:

• Convenor of the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network
• Member of the South Australian Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Working editor of the ICES International Journal of Marine Science. Editorial board member of the International Review of Environmental History and The Great Circle

Recent service:

• Convenor of the 2024 Annual Conference of the Australian Historical Association, hosted by Flinders University
• Convenor of workshop "Exploring an Urban Blue Humanities" in Oct. 2023, an interdisciplinary blue and environmental humanities workshop at the University of Bristol's Centre for Environmental Humanities, dedicated to exploring the relationship of cities and urban communities with their nearshore marine environments
• Co-convenor of the conference "Australia and the One Earth: Engaging with global environmental governance since Stockholm, 1972" in April 2022, an interdisciplinary exploration, with history, politics, IR, and more