DoctorAlessandro Antonello

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.

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.