Prof. Dr. Libby Robin

Libby Robin was a visiting scholar from September to December 2016, and from November to December in 2017.

Libby Robin is a historian of science and environment who works in both universities and museums. At the Australian National University, Canberra, she is a professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society, in the College of Science. She is an affiliated professor with the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm and with the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Libby co-convenes the Australian Environmental Humanities Hub with former RCC fellow Thom van Dooren, and is immediate past president of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). She was appointed to the International Advisory Board of the Rachel Carson Center from 2012 to 2018. Libby’s current research in progress includes Expertise for the Future, an international collaboration with Sverker Sörlin, KTH, Stockholm and Paul Warde, Cambridge Centre for History and Economics; outcomes of the project include The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, published in 2013 (Yale UP) and The Environment: A History (a forthcoming monograph for 2017). Understanding Australia in The Age of Humans: Localising the Anthropocene with University of Sydney (Iain McCalman), former Carson fellow Kirsten Wehner, and RCC affiliates Josh Wodak and Gregg Mitman 2016–2019, includes a festival (August 2017) and exhibition (National Museum of Australia) in 2019. At the Rachel Carson Center, she will be working on her monograph Fear of Ferals.

RCC Research Project: Fear of Ferals

Selected Publications:

• with Christof Mauch, eds. “The Edges of Environmental History: Honouring Jane Carruthers.” RCC Perspectives, no. 1, 2014.
• with Jennifer Newell and Kirsten Wehner, eds. Curating the Future: Museums, Communities, and Climate Change. Environmental Humanities. Routledge, 2016. (This book is the basis for the Museums and Climate Change Network) 
• “Anthropocene Cabinets of Curiosity: Objects of Strange Change.” In Remains of the Anthropocene: A Fragmentary History in 15 Objects, edited by Rob Emmett, Gregg Mitman, and Marco Armiero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2017.
• How a Continent Created a Nation. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. (Winner of the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Australian History)
• with Dag Avango, Luke Keogh, Nina Möllers, Bernd Scherer, and Helmuth Trischler. “Three Galleries of the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 3 (2014): 207–24.
• with Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, eds. The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. (Winner of the 2013 New England Book Prize for Anthologies)