emily o'gorman

I am an historian of environment, science and culture. My research explores how people live in and understand their environments, with a particular focus on rivers, weather and climate change. I am especially interested in the changing environmental practices and knowledges of town and urban dwellers, industry members (farmers, miners), managers and scientists (meteorologists, ecologists, engineers), as well as the institutions that connect them. My research examines both historical and contemporary changes in environmental understandings, their connections with specific places and the particular environmental experiences of actors. My research centres on two themes: Past, current and future river knowledge and management in Australia in the global context of climate change; and, the ways in which government and non-government scientists have conceptualised weather from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.

I am currently an Associate Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong, where I am undertaking postdoctoral research on histories and futures of food production and water use in the Murray-Darling Basin. I completed my BA (Honours) in history and cultural studies at the University of Queensland in 2004. My doctoral studies were carried out in the School of History, Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University. My PhD dissertation explores floods in the Murray and Darling river systems, from 1850 to the present. 


Publications
  • O'Gorman, E (forthcoming) Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin, CSIRO Publishing
  • O'Gorman, E. (2010) 'Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods?: Regulation and Responsibility on the Murray River in the 1950s', Ecological Humanities in the Australian Humanities Review, 48, pp. 87-107
  • O’Gorman, E. (2005) 'Colonial Meteorologists and Australia’s Variable Weather’, University of Queensland Historical Proceedings, 16, pp. 67-88

Book Reviews
  • O’Gorman E. (2009) 'Review of Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia' (edited by Emily Potter, Alison Mackinnon, Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay), Australian Humanities Review, 46
  • O’Gorman, E. (2007) 'Review of Libby Robin’s How a Continent Created a Nation' in Ecological Humanities: Australian Humanities Review, 42


Bourke Weir, Darling River