Dr. Saskia Beudel

Saskia Beudel is a writer and researcher whose research interests span cross-boundary forms of writing, environmental history, histories of science and anthropology, connections between place, memory, and narrative, and interdisciplinary approaches to environmental issues. Her book A Country in Mind examines how distinctive desert ecologies of Central Australia inform aesthetic, scientific, cross-cultural, and narrative responses. It is especially concerned with interrelationships between places and processes of memory, and between Western and Indigenous understandings of the desert environment. Her book Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future (with Jill Bennett) turns to artists, architects, writers, and designers to ask what might happen if we stopped “developing” cities and started curating—or caring—for them instead. The book aims to contribute to the imagining of sustainable urban futures in creative ways. Saskia recently completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2013–2016) and after completing her PhD in 2011, held a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of New South Wales (2011–2013). Her essays appear in Best Australian Essays, and literary journals including The Iowa Review, HEAT, and Overland. Her new research examines the history and future directions of innovative interdisciplinary approaches to environmental issues. It focuses on key figures whose work has crossed between and integrated scientific, humanistic, and literary fields, forging unlikely connections between things and communicating to public audiences.

RCC Research Project: Science as Culture: Transgressing Disciplinary Boundaries 1850–2050

 Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Science, Imagination and Narrative: Rachel Carson as Interdisciplinary Thinker

Selected Publications:

• “Donald Thomson’s Interdisciplinary Expeditions: Anthropology, Biology and Narrative in Northern Australia and England.” In Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the “Science of Man,” edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris. Oxford & NY: Berghahn [under review with publisher].
• Beudel, Saskia, and Jill Bennett. Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014.
• A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013.
• Beudel, Saskia, and Margo Daly. “Gallant Desert Flora: Olive Pink’s Australian Arid Regions Flora Reserve,” in “Arid Zone Science,” eds. Steve Morton, Libby Robin, and Mike Smith, special issue, Historical Records of Australian Science 25 (2014): 227–52.
• “Buffel Grass: An Augmented Landscape.” Cultural Studies Review 18, no. 3 (Dec 2012): 334–58.
• “Ground Glass.” The Iowa Review 42, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 33–44.