Thom van Dooren, FAHA, is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Humanities (Discipline of Gender and Cultural Studies), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, a position he has held since 2018. He earned a BA (Honours) in philosophy and religious studies from the Australian National University in 2003 and a PhD from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University in 2007. Early in his career, he held postdoctoral positions in the Department of Geography at the University of Hull, UK, in 2008, and in the Transforming Cultures research group at the University of Technology Sydney from 2009 to 2010. From 2011 to 2017, he was at the University of New South Wales, where he helped establish the Environmental Humanities group, including Australia's first undergraduate qualifications in the field and the world's first MOOC in environmental humanities.

Van Dooren's research lies at the intersection of environmental humanities, philosophy of science and the environment, science and technology studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and human geography, in conversation with the natural sciences and ethnographic work with local communities. His core focus is on philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of species extinctions and multispecies entanglements in threatened worlds; he co-founded the multidisciplinary field of extinction studies with Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew, and others. Notable publications include the books Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022). He co-founded the international open-access journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press) in 2012, co-editing it until 2020. Among his honors are the Biophilia Award in Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences from the BBVA Foundation (2025), Humboldt Research Award funded fellowship at the University of Cologne (2024), election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2022), Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2017-2021), Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich (2014-2016), and SOAR Prize Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2022-2023). He has served on the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2021-2023), as Co-Director of the Oceania Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment, and Co-Convenor of the Australian Environmental Humanities Hub. Additional appointments include Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo (2020-2022).

Professional Email: thom.van.dooren@sydney.edu.au