Tom Griffiths
Personal Information
Description
Tom Griffiths is a Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. His research, writing and teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural and environmental history, the comparative environmental history of settler societies, the writing of non-fiction, and the history of Antarctica. Tom’s books and essays have won prizes in history, science, literature, politics and journalism. His most recent monograph, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (UNSW Press and Harvard University Press, 2007), won the Queensland and NSW Premiers’ awards for Non-Fiction and was the joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2008.
Books
Hunters and collectors
Summary:The urge to preserve, to search for the past in order to package and present it, is a powerful impulse. This act of making history is not only the domain of academic historians and professional myth-makers. Thousands of amateur enthusiasts, driven by curiosity and local knowledge have explored documentary, oral and environmental sources to shape their own histories and perceptions of the land and its people, black and white. This book explores the historical imagination of these antiquarians, naturalists, ethnologists, archaeologists and collectors. In doing so, it searches for the roots of historical consciousness and environmental sensibilities in European Australia
Ecology and Empire
"Ecology" and "Empire" forged a historical partnership of great power -- and one which, particularly in the last 500 years, radically changed human and natural history across the globe. This book scrutinizes European expansion from the perspectives of the so-called colonized "peripheries", the settler societies. It begins with Australia as a prism through which to consider the relations between settlers and their lands, but moves well beyond this to a range of lands of empire. It uses their distinctive ecologies and histories to shed new light on both the imperial and the settler environmental experience. Ecology and Empire also explores the way in which the science of ecology itself was an artifact of empire, drawing together the fields of imperial history and the history of science."--Pub. desc.
Algorithms to Live By
Algorithms to Live By looks at the simple, precise algorithms that computers use to solve the complex 'human' problems that we face, and discovers what they can tell us about the nature and origin of the mind. An audiobook version can be found at [here]
Slicing the Silence
The author travelled as a humanities fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division in the summer of 2002-03. He was with the first Australian ship, arriving at Casey Station to deliver the new team "winterers" and take aawy the old.