Miles Powell is an associate professor of history at NTU, Singapore, where he studies marine and global environmental history and heads the university’s Green Humanities Research Cluster. His first book, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and The Origins of Conservation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2016), uses discourses of extinction to explore connections between racial attitudes and environmental thought in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. His current research projects include a global environmental history of human interactions with sharks (under contract with Harvard Univerisity Press), and a grant-funded study of Singapore’s marine environmental history. His research was published in Environment and History, the International Review of Environmental History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Western Historical Quarterly, and edited anthologies. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Environment and History.
RCC Research Project: Apex Predators: Encounters with Sharks since 1900
Selected Publications:
- Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016). - "Singapore’s Lost Coast: Land Reclamation, National Development, and the Erasure of Human and Ecological Communities, 1822–Present," Environment and History (2019). https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15631846928710.
- "A World of Fins and Fences: Australian and South African Shark Management in the Transoceanic South," International Review of Environmental History 3, no. 2 (2017): 5–30. 10.22459/IREH.03.02.2017.02.
- "People in Peril, Environments at Risk: Coolies, Tigers, and Colonial Singapore's Ecology of Poverty," Environment and History 22, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 455–482. https://doi.org/10.3197/096734016X14661540219393.
- "'Pestered with Inhabitants': Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and More Trouble with Wilderness," Pacific Historical Review 84, no. 2 (May 2015): 195–226. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2015.84.2.195.
- "Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty," Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 463–484. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.43.4.0463.