Prof. Dr. Tom Griffiths

Tom Griffiths is the WK Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism; he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2014. His research, writing, and teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural, and environmental history, public history, comparative global environmental history, the writing of nonfiction, and the history of Antarctica. In the summer of 2002–2003, he traveled to Antarctica as a humanities fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division, and in 2012 he was invited by the Australian Government to join the centennial voyage to Douglas Mawson’s historic huts in Antarctica. In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and was then appointed by the Vice-chancellor as Adjunct Professor of Climate Research at Copenhagen (2009–2013). In 2009 he coordinated and funded a community historical project with people in the Yarra Valley of Victoria who suffered in the “Black Saturday” firestorm of 7 February: two collaborative books and a film were released in 2012–2013. Tom is chair of the editorial board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a professorial associate of the National Museum of Australia, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU.

RCC Research Project: The Lore of the Land: Australian Natural Histories

Lunchtime Colloquium Video - The Lore of the Land: Australian Natural Histories

Selected Publications:

• Griffiths, Tom. Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Griffiths, Tom. Forests of Ash: An Environmental History. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Griffiths, Tom. Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Sydney and Harvard: University of NSW Press and Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Griffiths, Tom. “Environmental History, Australian Style.” Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 157–73.
• Griffiths, Tom. The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016.
• Hansen, Christine, and Tom Griffiths. Living with Fire: History, People, and Nature in Steels Creek. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2012.