Dr Alessandro Antonello

My research investigates the environmental and international histories of Antarctica, the cryosphere, the world’s oceans, and other marine environments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I'm also beginning to wade into histories of seagrass and other nearshore, intertidal and subtidal environments.

My current major project is titled “An international environmental history of the ‘World Ocean’, 1950s-2000s” - this project has been supported by an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (2019-22). This project aims to investigate the ways in which states, international organisations, and international communities have engaged with and conceptualised the ‘World Ocean’ as a natural environment from the 1950s to the 2000s. In the context of current environmental and geopolitical challenges for the ocean, this project aims to analyse how these actors built institutions, communities, and territories in and for the ocean environment as a foundation for generating knowledge and claiming power, rights, and resources.

More recently, I’ve begun to research histories of human relationships with and uses of seagrasses in the modern era, in Australia and globally. This seagrass research has also piqued my interest in what I've begun calling an 'urban blue humanities': exploring the relationships of coastal cities with their nearshore marine environments. This was the subject of my a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, in 2023.

I am eager to supervise research students (PhD and masters) in a wide range of subjects across environmental history, the environmental humanities and posthumanities, history of science, and international history. Prospective students are welcome to contact me directly.

• Global environmental history
• Oceans history
• Antarctic history
• Australian history
• History of environmental management
• History of environmentalism