libby robin

Libby is an historian of science and environmental ideas. She is a Senior Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University and Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia's Centre for Historical Research. Libby has published widely in the history of science, international and comparative environmental history and the ecological humanities. Her book How a Continent Created a Nation, won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Australian History in 2007. Her history of ornithology in Australia, The Flight of the Emu, won the inaugural Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for Science Writing in 2003.

Libby also coordinates the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network.


Current Projects

  • The History of Prediction - 'Expertise for the Future': histories of environmental prediction and policy.
  • Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve, an edited book with co-editors Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin, and about twenty other contributors. Writing and artwork to be completed 2009, for publication 2010 in association with an art show.
  • Violent Ends: The Arts of Environmental Anxiety (an event June 2009 and web-publication) Celebrating the visual arts, music, writing and dance, this event (co-convened with Carolyn Strange, William L. Fox and Tom Griffiths) considers the role of the arts in a time of global change (link).
  • Producing Biodiversity: A History of Science in Australia's desert lands, with Deborah Rose, Australian National University. Australian Research Council Discovery Project 0665034, 2006-2010.
  • Integrated History and future of People on Earth, IHOPE Australian chapter, part of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (link).
  • World Congress on Environmental History
  • History and Sustainability Project (UK), see Presentation ‘The Big Here and the Long Now’
  • Changing Climate: Historians and Hemispheres in Conversation, Harvard University, March 5-6, 2010. A two day symposium with Australian and North American historians of science and the environment in association with a graduate workshop Climate: science + humanities Graduate Perspectives from China, Australia, and the US (3-4 March 2010).

Selected Publications

Books

  • Libby Robin, Robert Heinsohn and Leo Joseph (eds.) Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country, CSIRO Publishing, 2009. Winner, Whitley Medal 2009 for Landmark Zoological Publication (Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales).
  • Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007.
  • Libby Robin, The Flight of the Emu: A Centenary History of Ornithology in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2001.
  • Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1998.
  • Mandy Martin, Libby Robin and Mike Smith, Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future, M Martin, Mandurama, Canberra, 2006.
  • R Quentin Grafton, Libby Robin and Robert J Wasson (eds), Understanding the Environment: Bridging the Disciplinary Divides, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005.
  • Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2005.
  • Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Keele University Press, Edinburgh, 1997.
 
Journal Articles and Chapters

  • Robin, Libby ‘Perceptions of place and deep time in the Australian desert: Using art in environmental history’ in Timo Myllantaus (ed) Thinking through the Environment, Cambridge: White Horse Press 2010 (in press)
  • Carruthers, Jane and Libby Robin, ‘Taxonomic imperialism in the battles for Acacia: Identity and science in South Africa and Australia’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 65(1), 2010 (in press)
  • Libby Robin,  ‘Advance Acacia Fair’, in Melissa Harper and Richard White, Australian Symbols, Sydney UNSW Press/NMA Press, 2010
  • Robin, Libby ‘Battling the Land: Environment and Identity in Settler Australian Society’, in PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature), June 2010 (in press)
  • Robin, Libby ‘New science for sustainability in an ancient land’, in Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (eds) Nature’s End: History and the Environment, London and New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, pp. 188-211.
  • Libby Robin, ‘The Eco-humanities as literature: a new genre?, Australian Literary Studies, May 2008, pp 290-304.
  • Libby Robin and Mike Smith, ‘Australian Environmental History: Ten Years On’, Environment and History, 14(2), May 2008, pp 1-4.
  • Libby Robin and Will Steffen, 'History for the Anthropocene', History Compass, August 2007, vol. 5, iss. 5, History Compass, 5(5) (2007): pp. 1694–1719; doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00459.x
  • Libby Robin, 'Home and away: Australian sense of place', Australian Humanities Review, 2007, issue 41.
  • Libby Robin, 'Ecology and identity: Australians caring for deserts', in David Callahan (ed.), Australia: Who Cares?, Australian Public Intellectual Network and European Association for the Study of Australia, Perth, 2007.
  • Libby Robin and Mike Smith, 'Science in place and time: archaeology, ecology and environmental history', in Chris Dickman, Daniel Lunney and Shelley Burgin (eds), Animals of Arid Australia: Out on their Own?, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Mosman, 2007, pp. 188-196.
  • Fischer, J., A.D. Manning, W. Steffen, D.B. Rose, K. Daniell, A. Felton, S. Garnett, B. Gilna, R. Heinsohn, D. Lindenmayer, B. MacDonald, F. Mills, B. Newell, J. Reid, L. Robin, K. Sherren and A. Wade, ‘Mind the Sustainability Gap’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 22(12) doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2003.10.071.
  • Libby Robin, 'Weird and wonderful: the first objects of the National Historical Collection', reCollections, 2006, vol. 1, no. 1.
  • Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, 'Environmental history in Australasia', Environment and History, 2004, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 439-74.
  • Libby Robin, 'The platypus frontier: eggs, Aborigines and empire in nineteenth-century Queensland', in Deborah Rose and Richard Davis (eds), Dislocating the frontier: essaying the mystique of the Australian outback, ANU E Press, Canberra, 2005, pp. 99-120.
  • Libby Robin, 'Collections and the nation: science, history and the National Museum of Australia', Historical Records of Australian Science, 2003, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 251-89.
  • Libby Robin, 'Nationalising nature', Journal of Australian Studies, 2002, vol. 73, pp. 13-26.