Tom Griffiths

Biography

Tom Griffiths is the W.K. Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, including the NSW Book of the Year Award, the Eureka Science Book Prize, the Ernest Scott Prize for History, the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History.

His research, writing and teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural and environmental history, public history, comparative global environmental history, the writing of non-fiction, and the history of Antarctica. In the summer of 2002-03 he travelled to Antarctica as a Humanities Fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division, and in 2012 he was invited by the Australian Government to join the centennial voyage to Mawson’s Huts.

In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and was then appointed by the Vice-Chancellor as Adjunct Professor of Climate Research at Copenhagen. In 2009 his Alfred Deakin prize-money funded a community historical project with the people of Steels Creek who had suffered in the Black Saturday firestorm: two collaborative books and a film were released in 2012-13. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a Professorial Associate of the National Museum of Australia and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU.