Patrick Anthony
HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, ENVIRONMENT, AND POWER IN EURASIA & THE WORLD
About me
Trained in Montana and Tennessee (PhD 2021, Vanderbilt University), I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Uppsala University. My current work explores nineteenth-century sciences of astronomy, climate, and geophysics at the edges of Russia’s colonial empire, juxtaposed against the Islamic sciences and nomadic geographies of central Eurasia.
My book Unearthed: Science and Environment across Mineral Frontiers is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (Spring 2026). Unearthed tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across mineral frontiers of the Americas and Eurasia and demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of anthropogenic climate change.
PDFs of my publications are available below.
Publications
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Unearthed: Science and Environment across Mineral Frontiers is forthcoming in the History of Science series with University of Chicago Press (Spring 2026).
This book tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across world mineral frontiers. It demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of climate breakdown: a nineteenth-century moment of extraordinary intensification in the scale and violence of schemes to govern large swathes of the planet, particularly in the Americas and across Eurasia. This was also a moment of corresponding intensification in combined sciences of earth and air, which then took on a planetary character. The physique du monde or “global physics” pursued by Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is iconic. A program of vast data collection and artful conjecture, physique du monde spanned empires and hemispheres in search of general laws of earth and environmental systems. The same claim to generality made global physics a key resource for aggressive European and settler states as they, in turn, sought to enclose frontiers from the trans-Mississippi west to the trans-Caspian east.
Humboldt’s itineraries, first through Prussian provinces then across Spanish and Russian empires, trace an information order that linked far-flung industrial sites and frontier stations. He himself moved through the circuits of Saxon miners, Mexican cartographers, and Siberian surveyors, among other itinerant Germans who mobilized the labor and resources of widespread mining operations for world surveys of earth and air. Accordingly, Unearthed ranges along the vertical axis, from mines to mountains and ore veins to isotherms. It opens a connected history of underground and atmospheric sciences co-produced with diverse agencies of war, empire, and global capital. Those sciences both measured and made modern natures, by turns documenting highly disturbed ecologies and directing their exploitation. Rooted in the fiscal-military states of Central Europe and coordinated across empires east and west, sciences of the mineral frontier laid the groundwork for carbon-intensive economics and crafted a logic of unending extraction.
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Events
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“ReOrient: Active archives and (counter)colonial spaces” (May 2025)
International conference at Uppsala University, sponsored by the European Commission and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Initiation Grant. Organized with Cristian M. Torres Gutiérrez and Hirra Ateeq.
“Measuring Eurasia: A Conference on Survey Sciences at the Edges of Empire” (June 2024)
International conference at University College Dublin, sponsored the UCD Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Humanities, and Earth Institute
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"Earth science as inner colonization: Prussia’s arts of world governance.” Talk sponsored by the conference on “The Geological Imagination in the Long Nineteenth Century” at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, April 2025.
“Measuring Eurasia: Empire, Islam, and the Sciences.” Talk at “History Hash Outs” at the Department of History, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, February 2025.
“Toward extractive histories of science.” Talk at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Higher Seminar on “New Approaches to the History of Mining,” September 2024.
“Terraforming tableau and the tracing of global capitalism.” Talk sponsored by “Extraction and Aesthetics: Pasts, Currents, Futures.” Jøssingfjord Science Museum and Sandbekk, Rogaland, Norway, September 2024.
“Eurasian transits: The many paths of astro-navigation from the Black Sea to Lake Balkhash,” at the conference “Measuring Eurasia,” UCD Humanities Institute, Dublin, Ireland, June 2024.
“Caucasian beech, Kazakh poplar, and the construction of colonial nature.” Talk sponsored by the University of Cambridge, “Colonial Natures” conference, June 2024.
“Extractive Histories of Environmental Science,” sponsored by the MINERALS Seminar Series and Podcast at the Humanities Institute of University College Dublin, November 2023.
“Mercenary Science between American and Eurasian Empires,” Conference on Spaces in Between and the History of Knowledge, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 5-6 October 2023.
“Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis,” German Historical Institute London, Bloomsbury Institute. 29 November 2022.
“A Wainwright’s Tale: Placing the Village in the History of Natural History,” Historical Institute, Universität Bern. 16 November 2022.
“Colonizing Earth and Air: Instructing Survey Sciences in Mexico and Siberia.” Conference on Colonial Instructions: Knowledge, Genre and Power, Uppsala University. 11 November 2022.
“Imperial Orography: ‘Liminal Experience’ in Central Asian Borderlands.” Conference Celebrating the Works of Martin Rudwick on his 90th Birthday. 19 April 2022.
“The Upland Exchange: Village Life in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” Cabinet of Natural History, Cambridge University. 18 October 2021.
“Working and Knowing: A Labor History of ‘Humboldtian Science’ from Prussia to Mexico and Back.” Modern European History Seminar, Cambridge University. 1 June 2021.
“Artisans in the Mountains: Topographies of Science and Work.” Colloquium for Science Studies, ETH Zürich. 28 April 2021.
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Teaching
My teaching interests range across the history of science, environmental history, Eurasian history and the history of global borderlands/frontiers.
In 2021, I was recognized by the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University for excellence in teaching.
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The Collecting and Displaying of Nature: Historical Perspectives (graduate level), Uppsala University.
Global History of Science and Environment, University College Dublin.
Readings in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (graduate level), Vanderbilt University.
American Medicine and the World, Vanderbilt University.
History of the Modern Sciences and Society, Vanderbilt University.
Darwinian Revolution: Issues in Contemporary Science, Montana State University.
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Image credit: Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin, 1891. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018693677/