James Dunk, historian and writer

Dr James Dunk
writer and historian

James Dunk

historian and writer living and working on unceded Wangal country, in Sydney
 
I write about mental illness and mental health, planetary illness and planetary health.

Contact

Memories of the Future, vol II

An evening of stories and music, held in September 2022 
To live well on this bruised planet we must know it and ourselves more deeply. Even as we wrestle with problems of daunting, impossible scale, we must retell stories at our own. Trained to scour through the collected memories of others, historians wander through the foundations of worlds. Tonight, we turn to our own history, prising words from memories about places that have formed us. We work to re-enchant the world, and to lay down memories for the future.
 
Image: NASA. Solar Eclipse's Shadow on Earth, captured by Terra's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, 9 May 2013

Overwhelm: Ecological emotions and the climate crisis

SEI Magazine Issue 7  (2022–23)

 
Following the Nature Feelz symposium which my Sydney Environment Institute colleagues and I convened late in 2022, this issue of the SEI magazine explores the complex ecological emotions and feelings that drive climate crisis and action. It brings together a diverse range of contributions and disciplines, both critical and creative, to highlight the cutting-edge ecological emotion research and responses focused in and around Australia. From reflections on environmental fiction as it becomes more aligned to reality, and photographic explorations of climate loss, to a manifesto for resilience as form of activism, Overwhelmed delves into loss and hope, witnessing and action as we collectively experience the affective impacts of the climate crisis.

Stories of the CityI worked with students from my urban history course to tell their stories of Sydney, an online event in History Week 2021 with a reading by acclaimed poet Toby Fitch from his book Sydney Spleen

reviews, essays, interviews

morethanhumanworlds

an interview with environmental Anthropologist Sophie Chao

unease and disease

Redrawing the Boundaries of Colonial Madness | Griffith Review

gaming in a crisis

interview with Phil & Meredith Walker-Harding, founders of Joey Games

writing the environment

encounters, transformation and perspectives in multispecies storytelling

psychiatry and the burdens of freedom

On Harri Yi-Jui Wu's history of mental health and the WHO | ABR

spaceship earth

'The Environment: A History of the Idea' by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin | Australian Book Review

invited correspondence: Not Waving, Drowning

Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Australia, Quarterly Essay 85, by Sarah Krasnostein

nuclear winter and planetary suicide

Pictures of Madness, by the Futures of Madness Network

joining the Sydney Environment Institute

On working across disciplinary boundaries

psychiatry and its discontents

On Andrew Scull's latest book| Australian Book Review

worth fighting for

Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Nuclear Crisis | The Conversation
 

the cabin in the woods

article | SL Magazine

Winner, Australian History prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020Shortlisted, University of Queensland Non-Fiction Award, QLD Literary Awards 2020Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020 
"Bedlam at Botany Bay offers readers a strikingly original re-reading of early colonial Australia. Beautifully crafted and deeply empathetic, this is a book with genuine literary and scholarly merit. It makes a significant and invigorating impact on the field of Australian history, and deserves to be read and discussed for many years to come." – Judge's Comments, New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020
 
"A brilliant and compassionate study. Vivid true stories spill out of these pages, illuminating colonial society with the myriad flares of private suffering." – Tom Griffiths AO
 
"by insisting that we should examine trauma and madness in their wider social contexts, by voyaging into emotional history and the predicaments of both the insane and the people who cared for them, James Dunk has opened promising new ways to understand the histories of empires and colonies." – Grace Karskens

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Reviews: Bedlam at Botany Bay

Judge's Comments: New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020

James Dunk’s Bedlam at Botany Bay is a truly innovative book. We are presented with a challenging and confronting history of madness in the early years of New South Wales, constructed from diverse sources including governors’ letters, colonial secretaries’ correspondence, institutional records and private letters. Dunk reveals extraordinary details about how colonial structures, life and circumstances drove people mad, and he invites us to reflect on the implications of the exceptionally coercive nature of a penal colony.
 
Bedlam at Botany Bay draws on a rich scholarship in exploring how the development of the British Empire influenced this aspect of colonial social and political history. We are reacquainted with many familiar names such as Macquarie, Darling and Macarthur, places like the Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum (Gladesville), and events including the Rum Rebellion. However, Dunk prompts us to think about this well-trawled time and place in new ways through stories of madness articulated and recorded at the time.
 
Combining meticulous research and compelling writing, James Dunk’s  Bedlam at Botany Bay  offers readers a strikingly original re-reading of early colonial Australia. Beautifully crafted and deeply empathetic, this is a book with genuine literary and scholarly merit. It makes a significant and invigorating impact on the field of Australian history, and deserves to be read and discussed for many years to come.
New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020

Judge's Comments: Ernest Scott Prize 2020

It’s the history of New South Wales, but not as we know it. The names are familiar, as are the events – Macarthurs, Wentworths, Blaxland, Bligh, rebellion, inquiries, select committees – but by paying close attention to the ‘strong personalities’, ‘eccentricities’ and ‘unfortunate endings’, Dunk puts us in the mirror house, where all that was familiar now feels strange and illuminating of quite a different colony. This is more than a collective biography, a history of whitefella madness, or the bureaucratic and jurisdictional journey to self-government. Dunk’s book reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about how things turn out: this is a rare feat in history-writing.
Ernest Scott Prize Shortlist

Dunk’s book is a lyrical, humane and creative approach to writing the history of madness in and out of the asylum in Australia. His introduction and conclusion are master classes in good historical writing, reminiscent at times of the great Geoffrey Blainey in their fluency and attention to the tiny hooks of experience that catch the attention and imagination.
Philippa Martyr, Social History of Medicine (paywall)

Bedlam at Botany Bay is a beautifully written and evocative account of the fragility and violence of the early colonial years of New South Wales. Its central theme is the eruption and management of madness in the early decades of the colony but in this remarkable account madness also becomes a lens through which to explore deeper emotional, personal and social undercurrents in colonial society: the trauma of being forcibly transported across the world; the travails of long sea voyages; the fracturing of family ties; the tenuousness of colonial settlement; the threat posed by an alien environment; the political upheaval of the early years of settlement that set colonist against colonist, convict against master and soldier against governor; and the violence attending dispossession of the first nations people they encountered.
Stephen Garton, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (paywall)

The prose is exceptional. There is a clarity of expression that allows the reader to engage deeply with the chaos that is so central to our conceptions of madness.
Rachel Franks, Dictionary of Sydney

Dunk’s prose is vivid, reflective and poetic. Thinking through the links between madness and history, he writes: ‘It seems to me that acute madness…is never less than a private suffering – something internal, perhaps incommunicable,which nevertheless clashes with the world. As it does, it opens a vein of history’ (5).
This is not a narrowly focused study but an ambitious social and political re-reading of the colony
from 1788 to around 1850, looking carefully at the ‘fault lines of society’ that madness throws
into high relief, as well as the fortunes and fates of the men and women who were or went mad.
Grace Karskens, Australian Historical Studies

There is tremendous value in Dunk's book for thinking historically about the role of medicine in establishing social order. While the book begins with a folk understanding of madness that escapes control, its concluding chapters show how 'professionalising doctors displaced lay therapies'. Medicine became part of the moral project of colonisation that sought to control the 'perilous chaos' that madness inflicted on the social and political body, and treat it as an illness.
Christopher Mayes, Health and History

News

9.12.2022
International Council of Psychologists
I'll be speaking on an Expert Panel on Climate Justice with Gonzalo Bacigalupe (University of Massachusetts Boston) and Erinn Cameron, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Fielding Graduate University and behavioral resident-clinical psychology intern at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
 
6.12.2022
Art, Play, and Ecological Emotion
We're returning to the Royal Hotel, Darlington, for a night of short film, poetry, photography and live performance: New Feels New Forms: Art, Play and Ecological Emotion. It was my pleasure to curate a vibrant and wonderful set of artistic engagements of ecological emotion. Films by Rowena Potts and Ceridwen Dovey and The Parallel Effect. Wordplay by James Dunk, Freya MacDonald, Christine McFetridge, Cameron Muir, Anastasia Murney, Lynda Ng, Kate Stevens, and Jamie Wang. Poems by Frances Grimshaw. Multispecies drag performance by Laurie Form. Photography by Lena Schlegel.
 
5–8.12.2022
Ecologial Emotion
In December I'll be convening a large interdisciplinary symposium at the University of Sydney together with Dr Blanche Verlie and others: Nature Feelz: Perspectives and Reflections on Ecological Emotion. Sponsored by the Sydney Environment Institute and RMIT.
 
8.09.2022
NSW Parliament
I'll be speaking about colonial suicide on a panel with Kirsten McKenzie and Penny Russell, 'Politics and the People: Interpersonal Politics, the Courts and the Press’, at the State of the Colony: People, Place and Politics in 1823, Legislative Council of New South Wales Bicentenary Seminar, NSW Parliament, Sydney. Watch the panel here.
 
27.04.2022
Deakin
At the end of April I'll be giving a paper called ‘Planetary Boundaries and Planetary Psychology: Beyond the Limits to Growth' to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University.
 
11.04.2022
Adelaide
In April I'll be deliving a paper entitled ‘Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered: Cold War, Climate Change and the Human Psyche, 1982–92,’ to the History Seminar at the University of Adelaide.
 
8.2.2022
Historians on Planetary Futures
In February I'll be presenting my work to the Historians on Planetary Futures seminar series run out of New Earth Histories and the Laureate Centre for History & Population at the University of New South Wales.
 
1.12.2021
Keynote Panel: Innovation in Health and Medicine
Delighted to be invited to speak about planetary health on a keynote panel with Charlotte Greenhalgh, Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen and Tatjana Buklijas at the ANZSHM Biennial Conference, 'Innovation in Health and Medicine,' at the University of Newcastle, 1-4 December 2021.
 
19.11.2021
Australian Academy of Humanities Annual Symposium
The Australian Academy of Humanities Annual Symposium is an important annual meeting of Australian humanities scholars. This year’s theme is Culture, Nature, Climate: Humanities and the Environmental Crisis, and I'll be talking about my research on mental health and ecological distress.
 
28.10.2021
Emotion, Anxiety, Environmental History
Together with wonderful colleagues in environmental history Margaret Cook, Nancy Cushing, and Rebecca Jones, I'll be talking about histories of ecological anxiety at the panel Anxiety and Emotion in Environmental History. Moderated by Andrea Gaynor and sponsored by the Sydney Environment Institute and Australian and Aotearoa Environmental History Network. Register here.
 
27.10.2021
The City of Sydney
I'll be giving a talk for the City of Sydney about my book, Bedlam at Botany Bay. Register here.
 
18.9.21
The Incoherent and Accidental: Blackheath History Forum
I'll be speaking to the wonderful community of historians at the BlackHeath History Forum, on 'The Incoherent and Accidental: Writing the History of Madness.' Watch me here.
 
6.9.2021
Words and Poetry: Stories of the City
I'm delighted to be curating an evening of talks by students of Sin City, the urban history course I've been teaching at the University of Sydney, for History Week 2021. Poetry reading by Toby Fitch from his new book Sydney Spleen. You can watch along here.
 
6.8.2021
Byron Writers Festival (cancelled due to covid-19)
I'll (now not) be at two panels in Byron this winter: Traumatic States of Mind: Colonial History (with Judy Atkinson and Mark McKenna) and Drugs, Magness and the Damage Done (with Benjamin Gilmour and Antony Loewenstein). 
 
27.4.2021
Mayhem and Margins
I'll be speaking at a special session of the Sydney Writer’s Festival together with the other winners of the NSW Premier's History Awards: Histories of Mayhem and Margins.
 
12.9.2020
Write Around the Murray Festival
I'll be speaking at two events during this online festival – an author talk at 2.30pm and a presentation in the panel Past Tense: History: What is it good for? Also presenting are Megan Davis, Tony Birch, Lucy Treloar, Chris Flynn, and the panel will be chaired by Clare Wright. Both events are free, but registration is essential.
 
7.9.2020
Pictures of Madness
Six historians will be giving flash talks at this online event for this year's History Week, hosted by History Council of New South Wales. Each talk will be tied to an image.
 
4.9.2020
NSW Premier's History Awards
I was thrilled to receive the Australian History Prize at the NSW Premier's History Awards – awarded for a major work of non-fiction on Australian history.
 
1.5.2020
Psychiatry and its Discontents
My review of Andrew Scull's latest book, Psychiatry and its Discontents, appears in the May edition of Australian Book Review (paywall).
 
23.4.2020
Ernest Scott Prize
Bedlam at Botany Bay shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize, for the most distinguished contribution to Australian or New Zealand History, or the colonisation of those places.
 
10.12.2019
One Health Aotearoa Symposium, Wellington
Planetary health researchers are exploring links between human health and the health of the planet's natural systems; this paper asks whether the mental health link might be more challenging, but also more productive.
 
9.12.2019
Charles Perkins Centre Exceptional Contribution Award 2019
I was awarded a prize by the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney for interdisciplinary research, including two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. The CPC is a superb meeting place of the biomedical sciences, humanities, and social sciences – exactly the sort of exchange we urgently need.
 
6.12.2019
New Earth Histories
In December a brilliant group of scholars will be hosted by Alison Bashford's New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, comparing origin stories, histories of planetary science, and cosmologies. I'll be speaking about calls for a new Western cosmology amongst psychologists concerned at the parlous relations between humans and other species.
 
22.11.2019 
Writing the history of the interior
I'll be speaking on this theme as part of a keynote panel at the University of Sydney history postgraduate conference, Writing History.
 
27.10.2019
Old Savoy Theatre
Author talk, Newcastle & Hunter District Historical Society, Old Savoy Theatre, New Lambton.
 
2.9.2019
Memories of the Future
As part of History Week 2019, Memory and Landscape, I'll be curating an evening of short talks and soundscape music, laying down memories for the future of places which are slipping away. Hosted by my good friends at Cafe Shenkin, with music by Asher Graieg-Morrison and words by JAMES FINDLAY, JARROD HORE, EMMA KLUGE, CATHY PERKINS, HOLLIE PICH, MARAMA WHYTE and JAMES DUNK.

 
Planetary Health and History

From settler psychology to new visions of health in the Anthropocene
 
Video by Chaylon Fraser for the Faculty of Science, University of Sydney

Current projects

By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

At a loss for words of loss

An experiment in slow, transformative collaboration

more information

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered

Towards a planetary mental health

Image: Wikimedia Commons: Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima_(from Matsuyama) 509th Operations Group

Mapping the conceptual history of planetary health

A collaborative project between the University of Sydney, Monash University, and KTH Stockholm

Image: NASA/USGS Landsat; Geoscience Australia. Source: Landsat gallery.

Climate Distress

An open intergenerational dialogue between young people, scholars, writers, artists, and clinicians

more information

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: towards a planetary mental health

This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are concerned with global environmental change, including conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and other subfields and interdisciplinary concentrations. Focusing on a network of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers based at a research center founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, the article explores what those who first turned to the psychological causes and implications of climate change and other kinds of global environmental disruption had learned from their studies of nuclear-era psychology. The explorations of these researchers and practitioners in systems psychology, depth psychology, and political psychology, elicited by the first truly planetary crisis of the modern world, the threat of general nuclear war (which, apart from the enormous damage done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and during weapons tests, remained largely theoretical), were applied to a new planetary crisis which was already unfolding: global environmental degradation. As they completed this pivot from the nuclear threat to the environmental crisis, at the end of the Cold War, using the language of the psychology of survival, these researchers displayed the form and function of what might be called a planetary psychology-of psychological theory and practice which broaches the planetary context of the individual psyche.
Dunk, J. (2022). Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: Nuclear threat, environmental crisis, and the emergence of planetary psychology. History of Psychology, 25(2), 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000208

Past projects

Memories of the Future

a planet burning hot, breathing ragged

To heal our planet we must know it more deeply.
Seven Sydney historians and a local musician shared stories in word and song of places that have formed us, to re-enchant the world and lay down memories for the future

Edward Charles Close, 'Sydney in all its glory’, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

The politics of madness in a penal colony

Madness emerges in strange places, and upsets everything.

My doctoral thesis uses madness to reveal the workings of colonialism in New South Wales from 1788-1856

Academic writing

Books

Bedlam at Botany Bay (NewSouth, 2019).
Winner, Australian History prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020
Shortlisted, University of Queensland Non-Fiction Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2020
Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020
Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020
Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy, with Barbara Brookes (Routledge, 2020).

Articles and book chapters

(In preparation) James Dunk, ‘Safe Operating Space? Limits to Growth, Planetary Boundaries, and the Human Psyche,’ in Making Environmental Objects: Global Environmental Governance in Historical Perspective, edited by Sabine Höhler, Gloria Samosir, and Sverker Sörlin (for Cambridge University Press).
 
Jordan Koder, James Dunk and Paul Rhodes, ‘Climate Distress: A Review of Current Psychological Research and Practice,’ The Psychology of Sustainability: Expanding the Scope, Sustainability 15, no. 10 (2023), 8115. doi.org/10.3390/su15108115 [Q2, h-index 109].
 
James Dunk, ‘Nuclear Winter: Science, Fiction, and Temporal Violence,’ in Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene, edited by Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek (Lexington Books, 2023).
 
Paul Rhodes and James Dunk, ‘Eco-Psychology: A Critical Paradigm in the Climate Emergency,’ Australian Psychologist, 22 January 2023, doi.org/10.1080/00050067.2022.2157240 [Q1, h-index 49].
 
Warwick Anderson and James Dunk, ‘Planetary Health Histories: Toward New Ecologies of Epidemiology?’ Isis 113, no. 4 (2022): 767–88 [Q1, h-index 45]. doi.org/10.1086/722308.
 
James Dunk, ‘Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered: Nuclear Threat, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Planetary Psychology,’ History of Psychology 25, no. 2 (2022): 97–120 [Q1, h-index 25]. doi.org/10.1037/hop0000208
 
James Dunk, ‘Wrongful Confinement and the Spectre of Colonial Despotism: The Political History of Madness in New South Wales,’ History Australia 19, no. 1 (2022): 34–53. doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2022.2028557.
 
James Dunk, ‘Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered: Nuclear Threat, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Planetary Psychology,’ History of Psychology 25, no. 2 (2022): 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000208.
 
‘Assembling Planetary Health: Histories of the Future,’ with Warwick Anderson, in Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, edited by Samuel S. Myers and Howard Frumkin (Island Press, April 2020): 17-35.
 
‘Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019’, with David S. Jones, New England Journal of Medicine (11 December 2019). doi:10.1056/NEJMp1913916.
 
‘Human Health on an Ailing Planet — Historical Perspectives on Our Future’, with David S. Jones, Anthony G. Capon, and Warwick H. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine 381:778-82 (22 August 2019): 778-82. doi:10.1056/NEJMms1907455.
 
‘Work, Paperwork, and the Imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 326-55. doi:10.1080/13642529.2018.1486956.
 
‘The Liability of Madness and the Commission of Lunacy in New South Wales, 1805-12’, History Australia 15, no. 1 (2018): 130-50. doi:10.1080/14490854.2017.1413942.
 
‘Authority and the Treatment of the Insane at Castle Hill Asylum, 1811-1825’, Health and History 19, no. 2 (2017): 17-40. doi:10.5401/healthhist.19.2.0017.

Co-edited Special Issues

'From the Margins: Madness and History in Australia' [with Catharine Coleborne], History Australia 19, no. 1 (2022).
 
‘Bureaucracy, Archive Files and the Making of Knowledge’ [with Barbara Brookes], Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 281-88. doi:10.1080/13642529.2018.1489578.
 
‘Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia’ [with Angeline Brasier], Health and History 19, no. 2 (2017): 1-16. doi:10.5401/healthhist.19.2.0001

Book and Exhibition Reviews

‘Admissions: New Voices in Mental Health edited by David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, and
Mohammad Awad (Upswell, 2022)] [Book Review], Health & History 24, no. 2 (2022): 205–7.
‘A Science of Our Own: Exhibitions and the Rise of Australian Public Science by Peter H. Hoffenberg (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)’ [Book Review], Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 112, no. 1 (March 2021): 193-94.
 
‘The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability by Carolyn Merchant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)’ [Book Review], Social History of Medicine (27 January 2021).
 
‘Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji by Jacqueline Leckie (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020)’ [Book Review], Journal of Pacific History (2 February 2021).
 
‘The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health’, edited by Greg Eghigian (Routledge, 2017) [Book Review], Health and History 21, no. 1 (2019): 90-94. doi:10.5401/healthhist.21.1.0090.
 
‘Louella McCarthy and Kathryn Weston, curators, “Caring for the Incarcerated”, University of Wollongong Library, Wollongong [Exhibition Review]’, History Australia 14, no. 4 (2017): 662-65. doi:10.1080/14490854.2017.1389255.
 
'Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873-1910', by Catharine Coleborne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), in Social History of Medicine (23 June 2016), doi 10.1093/shm/hkw069.
 
'Illness in Colonial Australia', by F. B. Smith (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), in Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 15 (2013), pp. 226-27.

Essays and literary reviews

Essays and other writing

(In preparation) James Dunk and Phil Walker-Harding, ‘Gaming Climate Change: Play, Affect and Crisis Habits,’ for Slade.
 
Interview with environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao, more-than-human worlds (August 2022).
 
'Designing Australian Games in an Ecological Crisis’ (with Meredith Walker-Harding and Phil Walker-Harding), Sydney Environment Institute (5 July 2022).
 
Invited correspondence: Waving, Not Drowning: Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Australia, by Sarah Krasnostein, Quarterly Essay 86 (July 2022): 117–19.
 
‘Writing Life No. 16: An Interview with Warwick Anderson,’ Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, 10 February 2022.
 
‘Writing the Environment: Encounters, Transformation, and Perspectives in Multispecies Storytelling,’ (with Sophie Chao and Hannah Della Bosca), Sydney Environment Institute (6 October 2021).
 
'Reaching Across Disciplinary Boundaries to Consider Ecological Futures,’ Sydney Environment Institute (19 August 2021).
 
‘Unease and Disease: Redrawing the Boundaries of Colonial Madness,’ Griffith Review 72: States of Mind (May 2021): 149–58.
 
‘Planetary Health Histories,’ interview with Warwick Anderson, James Dunk and Marcos Cueto for História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos blog (October 2020).
 
‘How Doctors Convinced the World the Planet Was Worth Fighting For,’ The Conversation (26 August 2019).

Book Reviews

'Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press, 2021),’ Australian Book Review, no. 434 (September 2021).
 
‘Psychiatry and its Discontents’ by Andrew Scull (University of California Press, 2019), Australian Book Review, no. 421 (May 2020).
 
‘Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Communicated Disease’ by Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton (Sydney University Press, 2017), Australian Book Review, no. 415 (October 2019), pp. 27-28.
 
‘The Environment: A History of the Idea’ by Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin (Johns Hopkins, 2018), Australian Book Review, no. 408 (January 2019).
 
‘The Memorandoms of James Martin: An Astonishing Escape From Early New South Wales’ ed. Tim Causer (UCL Press, 2017), Australian Book Review, no. 397 (2017).
 
‘Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time’ by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield (Oneworld Publications, 2016), Australian Book Review, no. 388 (2017), p. 49.
 
“A vision of past savagery that lies maddeningly between truth and fiction”: James Dunk reviews Sarah Drummond’s 'The Sound', Rochford Street Review, no. 19 (September 2016).
 
'Finding Sanity: John Cade, Lithium and the Taming of Bipolar Disorder', by Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore, in Australian Book Review, no. 386 (2016), p. 66.
 
'The Profilist' by Adrian Mitchell, in Australian Book Review, no. 378 (January-February 2016), p. 47.
 
'Seasons of War' by Christopher Lee, in Australian Book Review, no. 370 (March 2015), p. 60.
 
'The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon' by Laure Murat, translated by Deke Dusinberre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), in Australian Book Review, no. 369 (March 2015), p. 58.

Film Reviews

Partisan, dir. Ariel Kleiman, in Arts Update, no. 101.

Brief resume

BA PhD (Sydney)

2018– Research Fellow, University of Sydney

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, working on histories of planetary health, depth psychology, and human ecology.

2018– Conjoint fellow, University of Newcastle

2013-17 Research Associate, University of Sydney

I managed the the laureate research program Race and Ethnicity in the Global South, led by Professor Warwick Anderson.

Awards

Australian History Prize, NSW Premier's History Awards 2020 (Bedlam at Botany Bay) [$15,000].
 
Charles Perkins Centre Exceptional Contribution Award, 2019 [$2000].
 
Jill Roe Prize, Australian Historical Association, 2016.

Grants and Fellowships

ANU Australian Studies Institute Visiting Fellowship, 2023 [$5,000]

Co-Chief Investigator, ‘Young People and Climate Distress: Developing Clinical Tools for the Climate Crisis,’ Collaborative Fellowship, Sydney Environment Institute, 2022 [$32,000]

Co-Chief Investigator, ‘At a Loss for Words of Loss: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives on New Earth Lexicons,’ School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry Project Grant, 2022 [$4,867]

School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Research Support Scheme, 2022 [$7,509]
 
Harvard Mobility Scheme Grant, Office of Global Engagement, University of Sydney, 2019 [$8,108].
 
AHA-Copyright Agency Early Career Mentorship Scheme (with Catharine Coleborne, University of Newcastle), 2018 [$1,500].
 
EU Erasmus+ Mobility Grant, 2016 [EUR 2,780].

Contact

Department of History
Quadrangle A14
University of Sydney NSW 2006

james.dunk@sydney.edu.au

Name

Message

Dr James Dunkwriter and historian

James Dunk

historian and writer living and working on unceded Wangal country, in Sydney I write about mental illness and mental health, planetary illness and planetary health.

Memories of the Future, vol II

An evening of stories and music, held in September 2022

Overwhelm: Ecological emotions and the climate crisis

SEI Magazine Issue 7 (2022–23)

Stories of the City

I worked with students from my urban history course to tell their stories of Sydney, an online event in History Week 2021 with a reading by acclaimed poet Toby Fitch from his book Sydney Spleen

reviews, essays, interviews

morethanhumanworlds

unease and disease

gaming in a crisis

writing the environment

psychiatry and the burdens of freedom

spaceship earth

invited correspondence: Not Waving, Drowning

nuclear winter and planetary suicide

joining the Sydney Environment Institute

psychiatry and its discontents

worth fighting for

the cabin in the woods

Winner, Australian History prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020

Shortlisted, University of Queensland Non-Fiction Award, QLD Literary Awards 2020

Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020

Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020

Reviews: Bedlam at Botany Bay

Judge's Comments: New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020

Judge's Comments: Ernest Scott Prize 2020

News

Planetary Health and History

Current projects

At a loss for words of loss

An experiment in slow, transformative collaboration

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered

Towards a planetary mental health

Mapping the conceptual history of planetary health

A collaborative project between the University of Sydney, Monash University, and KTH Stockholm

Climate Distress

An open intergenerational dialogue between young people, scholars, writers, artists, and clinicians

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: towards a planetary mental health

Past projects

Memories of the Future

a planet burning hot, breathing ragged

The politics of madness in a penal colony

Madness emerges in strange places, and upsets everything.

Academic writing

Books

Articles and book chapters

Co-edited Special Issues

Book and Exhibition Reviews

Essays and literary reviews

Essays and other writing

Book Reviews

Film Reviews

Brief resume

BA PhD (Sydney)

2018– Research Fellow, University of Sydney

2018– Conjoint fellow, University of Newcastle

2013-17 Research Associate, University of Sydney

Awards

Grants and Fellowships

Contact

Dr James Dunk
writer and historian

historian and writer living and working on unceded Wangal country, in Sydney

I write about mental illness and mental health, planetary illness and planetary health.