Patrick Anthony
CRITICAL WORLD HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, ENVIRONMENT, AND TERRITORY
About
Trained in Montana and Tennessee (PhD 2021, Vanderbilt University), I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Uppsala University.
My current work explores how territorial regimes of the nineteenth-century world continue to act upon colonial modernity, from the frontiers of central Eurasia to the occupied Penobscot lands in which I grew up. This is a study in entangled logics of necro-geography, environmental warfare, and borderizing that, following Fanon, traces colonialism’s ‘lines of force’ precisely to ‘mark out the lines on which a decolonized society with be reorganized’.
My new book Unearthed: Science and Environment across Mineral Frontiers with the University of Chicago Press (2026) tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across mineral frontiers of the Americas and Eurasia and demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of anthropogenic climate change.
I am on the editorial board of the new, multi-disciplinary book series Rethinking Governance (Central European University Press/Amsterdam University Press), which provides a dedicated space for rethinking how governance is studied and compared across the Global South and the Global North. If you are interested in contributing to this series, and working with me on themes of environmental or techno-scientific governance, please contact me or the series editor, Youssef Mnaili.
PDFs of my publications are available below.
Publications
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Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers (University of Chicago Press, 2026).
How nineteenth-century environmental sciences laid the groundwork for global mineral extraction.
Unearthed depicts a pivotal moment during the nineteenth century: As European and settler schemes to govern ever larger territories intensified, the earth and atmospheric sciences were also becoming more global in scope, assembling models of the planet while making use of militarized or highly industrialized systems. These efforts were informed by the physique du monde, or global physics, of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a program of vast data collection that spanned four hemispheres that aimed to determine general, scientific laws about the planet and its environments.
Using Humboldt’s itineraries as a frame, Unearthed traces an information order that linked far-flung industrial sites and frontier stations, from Prussian provinces to the Spanish and Russian empires. Humboldt intersected with Saxon miners, Mexican cartographers, and Siberian surveyors, among other itinerant Germans who mobilized the labor and resources of widespread mining operations for global surveys of earth and air. Interweaving the histories of capital and climate, Patrick Anthony takes readers from mines to mountains to show how the sciences of Humboldt’s circuits both measured and made modern natures. These sciences of the mineral frontier, he argues, ultimately laid the groundwork for carbon-intensive economics and a logic of unending extraction. Wide-ranging and ambitious, Unearthed will interest scholars working in the history of science, global history, and the environmental humanities. -
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Guest editor with Youssef Mnaili of “Agencies and logics of elimination in global settler colonialisms,” special issue in progress for Settler Colonial Studies.
Guest editor with Catherine Gibson of “Measuring Eurasia: Survey Sciences at the Edges of Empire,” special issue in progress for History of Science.
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Kathleen Kete, The Alpine Enlightenment: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Nature’s Sensorium (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024). Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, forthcoming.
Andreas Daum, Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography, trans. Robert Savage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024). Journal of Modern History, forthcoming.
Ursula Klein, Technoscience in History: Prussia, 1750-1850. Isis 113, no.1 (March 2022): 187-89.
Events
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“Agencies and Logics of Elimination in Global Settler Colonialisms” (April 2026)
International conference at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), supported by the European Commission. Organized with Youssef Mnaili.
“ReOrient: Active archives and (counter)colonial spaces” (May 2025)
International conference at Uppsala University, sponsored by the European Commission and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Initiation Grant. Organized with Cristian M. Torres Gutiérrez and Hirra Ateeq.
“Measuring Eurasia: A Conference on Survey Sciences at the Edges of Empire” (June 2024)
International conference at University College Dublin, sponsored the UCD Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Humanities, and Earth Institute
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Faculty Lecturer, Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences: “Necro-geography: Problems of growth and the poetics of genocide.” Biblioteca Antoniana, Ischia, Italy, June 2026.
“Global Extractivism & Colonial Violence: A Preview of Unearthed.” Book launch at the University of Amsterdam, Environment and Society Group, March 2026.
"Earth science as inner colonization: Prussia’s arts of world governance.” Talk sponsored by the conference on “The Geological Imagination in the Long Nineteenth Century” at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, April 2025.
“Measuring Eurasia: Empire, Islam, and the Sciences.” Talk at “History Hash Outs” at the Department of History, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, February 2025.
“Toward extractive histories of science.” Talk at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Higher Seminar on “New Approaches to the History of Mining,” September 2024.
“Terraforming tableau and the tracing of global capitalism.” Talk sponsored by “Extraction and Aesthetics: Pasts, Currents, Futures.” Jøssingfjord Science Museum and Sandbekk, Rogaland, Norway, September 2024.
“Eurasian transits: The many paths of astro-navigation from the Black Sea to Lake Balkhash,” at the conference “Measuring Eurasia,” UCD Humanities Institute, Dublin, Ireland, June 2024.
“Caucasian beech, Kazakh poplar, and the construction of colonial nature.” Talk sponsored by the University of Cambridge, “Colonial Natures” conference, June 2024.
“Extractive Histories of Environmental Science,” sponsored by the MINERALS Seminar Series and Podcast at the Humanities Institute of University College Dublin, November 2023.
“Mercenary Science between American and Eurasian Empires,” Conference on Spaces in Between and the History of Knowledge, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 5-6 October 2023.
“Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis,” German Historical Institute London, Bloomsbury Institute. 29 November 2022.
“A Wainwright’s Tale: Placing the Village in the History of Natural History,” Historical Institute, Universität Bern. 16 November 2022.
“Colonizing Earth and Air: Instructing Survey Sciences in Mexico and Siberia.” Conference on Colonial Instructions: Knowledge, Genre and Power, Uppsala University. 11 November 2022.
“Imperial Orography: ‘Liminal Experience’ in Central Asian Borderlands.” Conference Celebrating the Works of Martin Rudwick on his 90th Birthday. 19 April 2022.
“The Upland Exchange: Village Life in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” Cabinet of Natural History, Cambridge University. 18 October 2021.
“Working and Knowing: A Labor History of ‘Humboldtian Science’ from Prussia to Mexico and Back.” Modern European History Seminar, Cambridge University. 1 June 2021.
“Artisans in the Mountains: Topographies of Science and Work.” Colloquium for Science Studies, ETH Zürich. 28 April 2021.
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Teaching
My teaching interests range across the global history of science, the environmental humanities, and border and frontier studies.
In 2021, I was recognized by the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University for excellence in teaching.
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Scientific Knowledge Cultures (Vetenskapliga kunskapskulturer), Uppsala University.
The Collecting and Displaying of Nature: Historical Perspectives (graduate level), Uppsala University.
Global History of Science and Environment, University College Dublin.
Readings in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (graduate level), Vanderbilt University.
American Medicine and the World, Vanderbilt University.
History of the Modern Sciences and Society, Vanderbilt University.
Darwinian Revolution: Issues in Contemporary Science, Montana State University.
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Image credit: Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin, 1891. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018693677/