EDUCATION
University of California, Davis. Ph.D., History, March 2013. Dissertation: “Vanishing Species, Dying Races: A History of Extinction in America.” Committee Chair: Louis Warren. Readers: Ari Kelman and Alan Taylor.
Simon Fraser University. M.A. History, December 2006. Thesis: “Coming Full Circle: An Environmental History of Herring Spawn Harvest Among the Heiltsuk.” Advisor: Joseph E. Taylor III.
Simon Fraser University. B. A. History (Honors, First Class), December 2004.
CURRENT POSITION
Tenured Associate Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
TEACHING AREAS
Environmental History, Native American History, World History, Transnational History, History of the North American West, United States 19th and 20th Century Cultural and Intellectual History, History of Race and Ethnicity.
PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS
BOOKS:
Apex Predators: Encounters with Sharks since 1900 (current project, under
contract, Harvard University Press).
Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and The Origins of Conservation (Harvard University Press, Fall 2016).
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:
“Singapore’s Lost Coast: Land Reclamation, National Development, and the Erasure of Human and Ecological Communities, 1822-Present” Environment and History (accepted)
“‘How Would You Feel If Someone Were Allowed to Kill One of Your Grandparents?’: Kānaka Maoli Opposition to the Hawaiian Shark Fin Trade,” invited chapter for Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice and Environmental History, Tracy Brynne Voyles and Mary E. Mendoza, Eds. (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
“A World of Fins and Fences: Australian and South African Shark Management in the Transoceanic South” International Review of Environmental History 3(2) (2017): 5-30.
"People in Peril, Environments at Risk: Coolies, Tigers, and Colonial Singapore's Ecology of Poverty" Environment and History 22(3) (Summer 2016), 455-482.
"'Pestered with Inhabitants': Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and More Trouble with Wilderness" Pacific Historical Review 84(2) (May, 2015): 195-226.
“Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty” Western Historical Quarterly 43(4) (Winter 2012): 463-484.
BOOK REVIEWS:
“Daegan Miller, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent” Environment and History 25(2) (May 2019).
“Ben A. Minteer, Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation” Journal of the History of Biology 51(3) (2018), 609-611.
“Timothy P. Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation, and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens” Environmental History 23(3) (June, 2018), 608-609.
“Frederick H. Swanson, Where Roads Will Never Reach: Wilderness and Its Visionaries in the Northern Rockies” Pacific Historical Review 85(4) (November, 2016), 632-634.
“Jen Corrinne Brown, Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West” Western Historical Quarterly 47(2) (May, 2016), 223-224.
“Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Diplomacy on the High Seas” Environment and History 22(2) (May, 2016): 304-306.
"Marco Armiero and Lise Sedrez, A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories" Environment and History 22(1) (February, 2016): 142-145.
“MacLaren, I. S., ed., Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park: Studies in Two Centuries of Human History in the Upper Athabasca River Watershed” Pacific Northwest Quarterly. V. 100, N. 1 (Winter, 2008-2009): 47-48.
PRESENTATIONS AND INVITED TALKS:
“Singapore’s Buried Coast: Lost Cultural Connections and the Struggle to Preserve a Hybrid Shore” (paper accepted for presentation at the Conference of the European Society for Environmental History, 21-26 August, 2019, Tallinn, Estonia).
"Revisiting the Frontier: The Legacy of Peter Boomgaard in Singaporean Environmental History" (paper presented at ICAS 11 [Eleventh Convention of Asia Scholars], 16-19 July, Leiden, Netherlands).
“Teaching the Environment at Fudan University, Shanghai and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore” (roundtable presentation at “Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities,” April 3-5, 2019, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, United States).
“Singapore’s Lost Coast: Human and Ecological Displacements during 200 Years of Land Reclamation” (paper presented at “From ‘Pelagic Empire’ to EEZs: The Transformation of Asia’s Pacific since the 19th Century” (24-25 January 2019, Asia Research Institute, Singapore).
“When Wilderness Was White: Preserving Nature and Race in Turn-of-the-Century America” (invited talk at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, November 29, 2018)
“An Invented Tradition? The History and Ecological Impact of Shark’s Fin Soup” (invited talk at the University of Oregon, Eugene, United States, October 25, 2018).
“Native Hawaiian Perceptions of Sharks: History, Resilience, and Legislative Significance” (paper presented at CLASS Symposium “Environmental Humanities: Paving the Way Towards a Sustainable Future,” NTU, Singapore, October 12-13, 2018).
“Soup and Slaughter: An Environmental History of the Pacific Shark Fin Industry” (paper presented at the 6th International Environmental History Conference [co-Sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center and Sun Yat-sen University] Guangzhou, China, May 24-26, 2018)
“People in Peril, Environments at Risk: The History of Tigers in Singapore” (invited talk at the
National Museum of Singapore, April 9, 2017).
“Sea Flows: Mobility, Boundaries, and Scale in Marine Environmental History” (paper presented
at the American Society for Environmental History, Chicago, March 29-April 1, 2017).
“Historicizing the Western Australian Shark Cull: Fish, Boundaries, and Mobile Nature” (paper presented at the Asian Association of World Historians Annual Congress, Singapore, May 29-31, 2015).
“‘A Very Paradise for Boys’: Joseph LeConte’s Reimagining of the Plantation as a Pioneer Outpost” (paper presented at the Western History Association Conference, Denver, Colorado, October 4-7, 2012).
“Preserving the Frontier” (chapter presented at Western History Dissertation Workshop, Huntington-USC, June 2011).
“A Wilderness Panacea: B.C. Landscapes as Respite from Modernity in the Fiction of Bertrand W. Sinclair” (paper presented at Qualicum History Conference, Qualicum, BC, January 28th, 2005).
PEER REVIEW:
I have served as a peer reviewer for Environment and History, Maritime Studies, and the Western Historical Quarterly.
AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
Aug 2016, Tier 1 Grant, “Red Dot, Blue Sea: An Environmental History of Singapore’s Coastal Spaces,” Singapore Ministry of Education.
May 2013, Canadian Aboriginal History Article Award for “Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty,” Western Historical Quarterly (winter 2012).
October 2012, Bert M. Fireman Award for “Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty,” Western Historical Quarterly (winter 2012), selected as the journal’s best student paper for 2012.
June 10-11, 2011, Western History Dissertation Workshop – one of four applicants selected from as far abroad as Australia to participate in an all-expenses-paid dissertation workshop hosted at The Huntington Library, University of Southern California, and sponsored by The Huntington-USC
Institute on California and the West, the Research Division of The Huntington Library, The Hemispheric Institute of the Americas at the University of California, Davis, The Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University, the Institute for the Study of the North American West at the Autry National Center, and the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West at Stanford University.
2007-2010, SSHRC Canada PhD Fellowship.
2008, Emile G. Scholz Essay Prize for “Vanishing Species, Dying Races: Environment, Science, Race, and Class in the Writings of William T. Hornaday,” voted the best preliminary research project of my cohort by UC-Davis’s history faculty.
2007, Reed Smith Fellowship, UC-Davis, awarded to an incoming graduate student showing outstanding potential.
2005, SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s.
2005, Graduate Fellowship – Master’s, Simon Fraser University.
2005, William and Jane Saywell Graduate Scholarship in History.
2005, Leon J. Ladner Graduate Scholarship in B.C. History.
2004, Margaret Ormsby Essay Prize for best Canadian history essay by an SFU undergraduate student.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE AND EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
August, 2019 - Present, Associate Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
October, 2017 – Present, Editorial Board Member, Environment and History (Journal of the European Society for Environmental History).
August, 2016 – Present, Admissions Coordinator, Department of History, Nanyang Technological University.
September, 2013-August 2016, Graduate Coordinator, Department of History, Nanyang Technological University.
August, 2013-August, 2019, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Summer, 2013, Co-instructor, Sliammon Field School, Powell River, British Columbia, Co-Sponsored by University of Saskatchewan and Simon Fraser University.
Spring, 2013, Instructor, HIST/FNST 326: North American Aboriginal History Since 1850, Simon Fraser University.
Spring, 2013, Instructor, HIST 109: United States History Since 1865, Capilano University.
2007-2011, Substitute Lecturer, University of California, Davis.
2007-2010, Teaching Assistant, University of California, Davis.
2009-2010, UC-Davis History Library Proctor.
2009, Research Assistant for American Environmental History, Louis Warren, Ed.
2009, Graduate Student Co-Chair, Africanist Search Committee, UC-Davis.
2005-2006, Teaching Assistant, Simon Fraser University.
University of California, Davis. Ph.D., History, March 2013. Dissertation: “Vanishing Species, Dying Races: A History of Extinction in America.” Committee Chair: Louis Warren. Readers: Ari Kelman and Alan Taylor.
Simon Fraser University. M.A. History, December 2006. Thesis: “Coming Full Circle: An Environmental History of Herring Spawn Harvest Among the Heiltsuk.” Advisor: Joseph E. Taylor III.
Simon Fraser University. B. A. History (Honors, First Class), December 2004.
CURRENT POSITION
Tenured Associate Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
TEACHING AREAS
Environmental History, Native American History, World History, Transnational History, History of the North American West, United States 19th and 20th Century Cultural and Intellectual History, History of Race and Ethnicity.
PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS
BOOKS:
Apex Predators: Encounters with Sharks since 1900 (current project, under
contract, Harvard University Press).
Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and The Origins of Conservation (Harvard University Press, Fall 2016).
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:
“Singapore’s Lost Coast: Land Reclamation, National Development, and the Erasure of Human and Ecological Communities, 1822-Present” Environment and History (accepted)
“‘How Would You Feel If Someone Were Allowed to Kill One of Your Grandparents?’: Kānaka Maoli Opposition to the Hawaiian Shark Fin Trade,” invited chapter for Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice and Environmental History, Tracy Brynne Voyles and Mary E. Mendoza, Eds. (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
“A World of Fins and Fences: Australian and South African Shark Management in the Transoceanic South” International Review of Environmental History 3(2) (2017): 5-30.
"People in Peril, Environments at Risk: Coolies, Tigers, and Colonial Singapore's Ecology of Poverty" Environment and History 22(3) (Summer 2016), 455-482.
"'Pestered with Inhabitants': Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and More Trouble with Wilderness" Pacific Historical Review 84(2) (May, 2015): 195-226.
“Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty” Western Historical Quarterly 43(4) (Winter 2012): 463-484.
BOOK REVIEWS:
“Daegan Miller, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent” Environment and History 25(2) (May 2019).
“Ben A. Minteer, Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation” Journal of the History of Biology 51(3) (2018), 609-611.
“Timothy P. Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation, and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens” Environmental History 23(3) (June, 2018), 608-609.
“Frederick H. Swanson, Where Roads Will Never Reach: Wilderness and Its Visionaries in the Northern Rockies” Pacific Historical Review 85(4) (November, 2016), 632-634.
“Jen Corrinne Brown, Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West” Western Historical Quarterly 47(2) (May, 2016), 223-224.
“Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Diplomacy on the High Seas” Environment and History 22(2) (May, 2016): 304-306.
"Marco Armiero and Lise Sedrez, A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories" Environment and History 22(1) (February, 2016): 142-145.
“MacLaren, I. S., ed., Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park: Studies in Two Centuries of Human History in the Upper Athabasca River Watershed” Pacific Northwest Quarterly. V. 100, N. 1 (Winter, 2008-2009): 47-48.
PRESENTATIONS AND INVITED TALKS:
“Singapore’s Buried Coast: Lost Cultural Connections and the Struggle to Preserve a Hybrid Shore” (paper accepted for presentation at the Conference of the European Society for Environmental History, 21-26 August, 2019, Tallinn, Estonia).
"Revisiting the Frontier: The Legacy of Peter Boomgaard in Singaporean Environmental History" (paper presented at ICAS 11 [Eleventh Convention of Asia Scholars], 16-19 July, Leiden, Netherlands).
“Teaching the Environment at Fudan University, Shanghai and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore” (roundtable presentation at “Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities,” April 3-5, 2019, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, United States).
“Singapore’s Lost Coast: Human and Ecological Displacements during 200 Years of Land Reclamation” (paper presented at “From ‘Pelagic Empire’ to EEZs: The Transformation of Asia’s Pacific since the 19th Century” (24-25 January 2019, Asia Research Institute, Singapore).
“When Wilderness Was White: Preserving Nature and Race in Turn-of-the-Century America” (invited talk at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, November 29, 2018)
“An Invented Tradition? The History and Ecological Impact of Shark’s Fin Soup” (invited talk at the University of Oregon, Eugene, United States, October 25, 2018).
“Native Hawaiian Perceptions of Sharks: History, Resilience, and Legislative Significance” (paper presented at CLASS Symposium “Environmental Humanities: Paving the Way Towards a Sustainable Future,” NTU, Singapore, October 12-13, 2018).
“Soup and Slaughter: An Environmental History of the Pacific Shark Fin Industry” (paper presented at the 6th International Environmental History Conference [co-Sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center and Sun Yat-sen University] Guangzhou, China, May 24-26, 2018)
“People in Peril, Environments at Risk: The History of Tigers in Singapore” (invited talk at the
National Museum of Singapore, April 9, 2017).
“Sea Flows: Mobility, Boundaries, and Scale in Marine Environmental History” (paper presented
at the American Society for Environmental History, Chicago, March 29-April 1, 2017).
“Historicizing the Western Australian Shark Cull: Fish, Boundaries, and Mobile Nature” (paper presented at the Asian Association of World Historians Annual Congress, Singapore, May 29-31, 2015).
“‘A Very Paradise for Boys’: Joseph LeConte’s Reimagining of the Plantation as a Pioneer Outpost” (paper presented at the Western History Association Conference, Denver, Colorado, October 4-7, 2012).
“Preserving the Frontier” (chapter presented at Western History Dissertation Workshop, Huntington-USC, June 2011).
“A Wilderness Panacea: B.C. Landscapes as Respite from Modernity in the Fiction of Bertrand W. Sinclair” (paper presented at Qualicum History Conference, Qualicum, BC, January 28th, 2005).
PEER REVIEW:
I have served as a peer reviewer for Environment and History, Maritime Studies, and the Western Historical Quarterly.
AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
Aug 2016, Tier 1 Grant, “Red Dot, Blue Sea: An Environmental History of Singapore’s Coastal Spaces,” Singapore Ministry of Education.
May 2013, Canadian Aboriginal History Article Award for “Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty,” Western Historical Quarterly (winter 2012).
October 2012, Bert M. Fireman Award for “Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty,” Western Historical Quarterly (winter 2012), selected as the journal’s best student paper for 2012.
June 10-11, 2011, Western History Dissertation Workshop – one of four applicants selected from as far abroad as Australia to participate in an all-expenses-paid dissertation workshop hosted at The Huntington Library, University of Southern California, and sponsored by The Huntington-USC
Institute on California and the West, the Research Division of The Huntington Library, The Hemispheric Institute of the Americas at the University of California, Davis, The Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University, the Institute for the Study of the North American West at the Autry National Center, and the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West at Stanford University.
2007-2010, SSHRC Canada PhD Fellowship.
2008, Emile G. Scholz Essay Prize for “Vanishing Species, Dying Races: Environment, Science, Race, and Class in the Writings of William T. Hornaday,” voted the best preliminary research project of my cohort by UC-Davis’s history faculty.
2007, Reed Smith Fellowship, UC-Davis, awarded to an incoming graduate student showing outstanding potential.
2005, SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s.
2005, Graduate Fellowship – Master’s, Simon Fraser University.
2005, William and Jane Saywell Graduate Scholarship in History.
2005, Leon J. Ladner Graduate Scholarship in B.C. History.
2004, Margaret Ormsby Essay Prize for best Canadian history essay by an SFU undergraduate student.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE AND EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
August, 2019 - Present, Associate Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
October, 2017 – Present, Editorial Board Member, Environment and History (Journal of the European Society for Environmental History).
August, 2016 – Present, Admissions Coordinator, Department of History, Nanyang Technological University.
September, 2013-August 2016, Graduate Coordinator, Department of History, Nanyang Technological University.
August, 2013-August, 2019, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Summer, 2013, Co-instructor, Sliammon Field School, Powell River, British Columbia, Co-Sponsored by University of Saskatchewan and Simon Fraser University.
Spring, 2013, Instructor, HIST/FNST 326: North American Aboriginal History Since 1850, Simon Fraser University.
Spring, 2013, Instructor, HIST 109: United States History Since 1865, Capilano University.
2007-2011, Substitute Lecturer, University of California, Davis.
2007-2010, Teaching Assistant, University of California, Davis.
2009-2010, UC-Davis History Library Proctor.
2009, Research Assistant for American Environmental History, Louis Warren, Ed.
2009, Graduate Student Co-Chair, Africanist Search Committee, UC-Davis.
2005-2006, Teaching Assistant, Simon Fraser University.