PATRICK ANTHONY, Ph.D.

HISTORIES OF SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

I am a social historian of science, empire, and extractivism who works across Eurasian and world geographies. I am especially interested in trans-regional histories of earth and environmental sciences, as well as survey sciences like geodesy, meteorology, and astronomy, which linked German and Baltic regions of Europe to global processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

My forthcoming book, Unearthed: Science and Environment across Mineral Frontiers, tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across mineral frontiers of the Americas and Eurasia. It demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of climate change: a nineteenth-century moment of extraordinary intensification in the scale and violence of Euro-American schemes to govern large swathes of the planet.

I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Uppsala University. My project Anthropocene Frontiers: Colonial Climate Science in Siberia and Central Asia analyzes knowledge and violence at the edges of Russia’s colonial empire. The project opens to wider inquiry into Baltic German projects of long-range celestial and geophysical observation in the nineteenth-century Caucasus and Kazakh Steppe, which I juxtapose with the Islamic sciences across the Turko-Persianate world.

Click here to download a copy of my CV. PDFs of my articles are available here.