Dr. Miles Powell

Currently holding a German Research Foundation (DFG) grant cohosted by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, Miles Powell was previously an associate professor of environmental history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He researches marine and global environmental history, with a special focus on the themes of commodification, endangerment, and human–predator interactions. His first book, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (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 University Press), a study of world ports in the Anthropocene, and an environmental history of North Sea nitrogen flows. His research has appeared in Environment and History, Environmental History, International Review of Environmental History, Pacific Historical Review, Western Historical Quarterly, and edited anthologies. He currently serves on the editorial board of Environment and History.

RCC Research Project: Frenzy: Sharks, Humans, and the Fate of the Oceans

Selected Publications:

• “‘How Would You Feel If Someone Were Allowed to Kill One of Your Grandparents?’: Native Hawaiian Opposition to the Pacific Shark Fin Trade.” In Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, edited by Mary E. Mendoza and Traci Brynne Voyles. University of Nebraska Press, 2024.
• “Harnessing the Great Acceleration: Connecting Local and Global Environmental History at the Port of Singapore.” Environmental History 27, no. 3 (2022): 441–66. https://doi.org/10.1086/719744.
• “Singapore’s Lost Coast: Land Reclamation, National Development, and the Erasure of Human and Ecological Communities, 1822–Present.” Environment and History 27, no. 4 (2021): 635–63. 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. http://dx.doi.org/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 (2016): 455–82. https://doi.org/10.3197/096734016X14661540219393.
• Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation. Harvard University Press, 2016.