Patrick Anthony

Keywords

• history of science
• environment
• empire
• extraction
• Eurasia
• global history

Biography

Patrick Anthony is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. He is the author of the book Unearthed: Science and Environment across Mineral Frontiers, coming out with the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2026. Unearthed tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across world mineral frontiers in the nineteenth century and demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of anthropogenic climate change.

Patrick is currently editing special collections on survey sciences at the edges of Russia’s colonial empire for History of Science (with Catherine Gibson) and on logics of elimination in global settler colonialisms for Settler Colonial Studies (with Youssef Mnaili). His current research explores Imperial Russian programs of astronomy, geophysics, and climatology in the nineteenth century, juxtaposed with the Islamic sciences of central Eurasia.

Patrick received his PhD in History from Vanderbilt University in 2021 and held postdoctoral positions in the Germany, the UK, Hungary, and Ireland. He is now a Research Partner in the projects Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire (Uppsala University) and (Tartu University) Entangled Borderlands: Mapping Intra-Imperial Connections for a New Spatial History of the Romanov Empire.

Research

Book

Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, [February] 2026).

Articles

“Nature’s keepers: Working families and the economy of earthly objects,” accepted and forthcoming in History of Science, special issue Making science of things, eds. Brooke Penaloza-Patzak and Tamara Fernando (2025).

“A Global History of Global Physics,” accepted and forthcoming in Filozofski vestnik, special issue on new approaches in the history of science, ed. Svit Komel (2025).

Introduction to “Rural Dynamics: Migrations, Marginality, and Material Flows in Germanophone Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” special section in German Studies Review 47, no. 1 (2024): 81-83.

“Julie von Bechtolsheim, a Political Life: Women’s Work and Governance in the Age of Revolution,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 4 (2023): 475-498.

“Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis,” Journal of Social History, 56, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 352-385.

“Introduction to Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700-1830,” History of Science and Humanities 44 (2021): 115-136.

“Making Historicity: Paleontology and the Proximity of the Past in Germany, 1770-1820,” Journal of the History of Ideas 82, no. 2 (April 2021): 231-56.

“Labour, folklore, and environmental politics in German mining around 1800,” The Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2021): 583-605.

“Mines, mountains, and the making of a vertical consciousness in Germany ca. 1800,” Centaurus 62, no. 4 (2020): 612-30.

“Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” Isis 109, no. 1 (2018): 28-55.

“Race and Republicanism in Philadelphia’s Aurora: Views of Revolutions in Saint-Domingue and Latin America, 1798-1822,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 141, no. 1 (January 2017): 31-58.

Edited

Guest editor with Catherine Gibson of “Measuring Eurasia: Survey sciences at the edges of empire,” special issue of History of Science (forthcoming 2025).

Guest editor of “Rural Dynamics: Migrations, Marginality, and Material Flows in Germanophone Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” special section forthcoming in German Studies Review 47, no. 1 (2024).

Guest editor of “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700-1830,” special issue of Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte – History of Science and Humanities 44 (2021).

Chapters

[With Jennifer Keating] “Maps of elevation and atmosphere: Uncertain measures and the making of dynamic climates,” forthcoming in Layers of Empire: The Romanov Empire in Thematic Maps, eds. Catherine Gibson and Anton Kotenko (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

“The View from the Wachtberg: Surveying a Mineral Empire in Central Asian Borderlands,” Die Tagebücher der russisch-sibirischen Reise. Edition Humboldt, eds. Tobias Kraft and Florian Schnee (Berlin: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023).

Other

Zachary Dorner, Patrick Anthony, Jody Benjamin, Nicholas B. Miller, Kate Mulry, “Roundtable: Entanglements of Coercive Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic and Beyond,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 21, no. 1 (March 2024): 11-26. 

Patrick Anthony, Juliana Broad, Xan Chacko, Zachary Dorner, Judith Kaplan, and Duygu Yildrim, “(Un)making labor invisible: a syllabus,” History of Science 61, no. 4 (2023): 608-624.

Conference organization

“ReOrient: Active archives and (counter)colonial spaces” (May 2025). Organizer with Cristian M. Torres Gutiérrez and Hirra Ateeq of international conference at Uppsala University, sponsored by the European Commission and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Initiation 2025 Grant, featuring a keynote from Dr. Jamila Ghaddar (Amsterdam University).

“Measuring Eurasia: A Conference on Survey Sciences at the Edges of Empire” (June 2024). Organizer of international conference at University College Dublin, sponsored the UCD Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Humanities, and Earth Institute, featuring a keynote from Dr. Adeeb Khalid (Carleton College).

Media

Website: https://www.patrickanthonyhistory.com/

Lecture recorded for the Imperial Minerals Podcast: “Underlands, Empires, Atmospheres: Extractive Histories of Environmental Science”

Interview with the Podcast of the German Historical Institute of London: “Climate Crises and Politics in the Eighteenth Century”

Time to Eat the Dogs, “Episode 32: Rethinking Humboldt,” Podcast Interview