Thom van Dooren is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and a Humboldt Research Award funded Fellow at MESH at the University of Cologne. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Co-Director of the Oceania Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment initiative (with Sophie Chao and Craig Santos Perez), and Co-Convenor of the Australian Environmental Humanities Hub (with Libby Robin).
Van Dooren was founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press) and is co-Director of the Oceania Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment initiative. From 2020-2022 he was a Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo, from 2017-2021 he was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney, and from 2014-2016 he was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich (2014-16). In 2023, he received a Humboldt Research Award for his career contributions to date. He has held other visiting positions at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA (2005, 2010) the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm (2014), the Department of Anthropology at MIT (2018), and the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa (2018). www.thomvandooren.org
His research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia UP 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT 2022). These books have been translated into French and Japanese (with other translations in process) and have won or been shortlisted for a range of prizes including the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the Gold Nautilus Book Award, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (non-fiction, shortlisted).