James Dunk, historian and writer

Dr James Dunk
I am a historian and interdisciplinary researcher, and my research, teaching and writing explore how health, medicine and psychology are changing in the face of planetary crises.

Currently a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, I lead the planetary mental health theme on the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts. I also co-direct the Ecological Emotion Research Lab and convene the Climate Distress, Art and Open Dialogue Community of Practice.

My first book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, won the Australian History Prize at the 2020 NSW Premier's History Awards and was also shortlisted for several other prizes. My research on planetary health, mental health and ecological distress has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Sustainability, History of Psychology, Australian Psychologist and Rethinking History, and my literary reviews and essays appear in Griffith Review, Australian Book Review, and other places.

Academic Profile

Contact
Reviews, essays & interviews

narrowneck: a communal photo essay & a wordweave
Emotional Ecologies | Network in Canadian History & Environment
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
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
Bedlam at Botany Bay
Winner, Australian History Prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020
Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020
Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards 2020
Shortlisted, 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

Reviews | Buy Now
News

15–19.9.2023
Meetings on ecological distress and open dialogue, Helsinki
In September I'll have meetings in Helsinki with leading figures in open dialogue, a therapetuic method developed in Helsinki for use with voice hearers, and with prominent researchers working on ecological anxiety and climate distress, including eco-theologian Panu Pihkala.

9.2023
Visiting Scholar, KTH Stockholm
I'll be a visiting scholar with the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab in September 2023, collaborating with researchers on the ERC-funded project Study of the Planetary Human-Environment Relationships (SPHERE) on the psychological dynamics of the human-Earth relationship.

7.9.2023
Talk: Environmental Humanities Lab, History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Stockholm
Environ/mental: Planetary Mental Health and the Ecological Self
If planetary health is a new transdisciplinary agenda to attend to the ‘health’ of the planet and its living systems in order to preserve human health and life – is planetary mental health a simple extension? This paper surveys the emerging programme (or programmes) of planetary mental health. What constitutes planetary mental health? How does the systems approach implicit in planetary health intersect with ecological theories in psychology and psychiatry? How might the psychological frames implicit in mental health fields complicate the assumptions bound up in planetary health? Planetary mental health also demands a more thorough attention of the personal in the planetary health imaginary, bringing the history of deep ecology and ecopsychology to bear on planetary health literature dominated by public health and epidemiology, and looking to theories of ecological subjectivity and emotion advanced in the social sciences and environmental humanities. 12–1.30pm, Teknikringen 74D (floor 5). Register here.

30.8–2.9.2023
European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH), Oslo
I'll be presenting on the intersection of the experience of ecological distress and the planetary health frame: Ecological anxiety and planetary mental health: contemporary histories.

29.8.2023
Medical Humanities: Anthropology and History, University of Oslo
I'll be speaking about planetary mental health in the Medical Anthropology and History Seminar Series at the University of Oslo.

22–26.8.2023
European Society for Environmental History, Bern

21.8.2023
Environmental Humanities, NTU
I'll be speaking on the theme Person/Planet: Towards a Planetary Mental Health to the environmental humanities group at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Monday 21 August, 2.30–4pm, SHHK Meeting Room 2 (03-93) & online, register here.

23.6.2023
Almostice, Canberra
Together with National Museum of Australia curator Kirsten Wehner and environmental historian Cameron Muir, (both editors, with Jenny Newell, of the wonderful book Living with the Anthropocene), I gathered friends and colleagues for an almost-solstice evening where we shared stories, poems, films and photographs on the theme of rhythm and arhythmia – on being out of step.

6.2023
Visiting Fellow, ANU Australian Studies Institute
For the month of June I'll be a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, exploring Australian contributions to human ecology, environmental epidemiology and planetary health.

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.

8.9.2022
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.

27.4.2022
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.

11.4.2022
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.
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.
An Earth Lexicon for Children

I asked friends and colleagues, all environmental researchers and writers, to share some words with the coming generations – old words, borrowed words, and made-up words. Georgie Igoe has created art to accompany the definitions which we have worked up together.

Read by Aubrey and Ira Dunk. Film by Lisa Grant, featuring Hazel and Wilder Grant. Film editing by Stephanie Dunk. Word editing by James Dunk. Words and definitions by: Glenn Albrecht, James Bradley, Danielle Celermajer, Sophie Chao, Andrew Errington, Billy Griffiths, Rohan Howitt, Rachel Douglas Jones, Jamie Lorimer, Ruth Morgan, and Emily O’Gorman.
Stories of the City
I worked with students from my urban history course to tell their stories of Sydney in an online event, with a reading by acclaimed poet Toby Fitch from his book Sydney Spleen
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

At a loss for words of loss
An experiment in slow, transformative collaboration
See our photo essay, 'Narrowneck,' and audio poem published in the NiCHE series Emotional Ecologies.
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered
Towards a planetary psychology
Research article published in APA journal History of Psychology
Image: Wikimedia Commons: Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima_(from Matsuyama) 509th Operations Group
Mapping the conceptual history of planetary mental health
Within the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts, led by 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 psychology
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
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
Academic books & articles

Books
Bedlam at Botany Bay (NewSouth, 2019).
Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy, with Barbara Brookes (Routledge, 2020).
Articles & 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 & Sections
'Covid and the Historians,' Health & History 25, no. 1 (2023).

'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 & literary reviews

Essays and other writing
(In preparation) James Dunk and Phil Walker-Harding, ‘Gaming Climate Change: Play, Affect and Crisis Habits,’ for Slade.

'Languages of Loss and Renewal: A Wordweave' (an audio poem with Freya MacDonald, Christine McFetridge, Cameron Muir, Anastasia Murney, Lynda Ng, Kate Stevens, and Jamie Wang), Emotional Ecologies, Network in Canadian History & Environment, 25 July 2023.

'Narrowneck: A Communal Photo Journal' (with Christine McFetridge, Cameron Muir, Anastasia Murney, and Jamie Wang), Emotional Ecologies, Network in Canadian History & Environment, 25 July 2023.

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 (Adv Hons I) PhD (Sydney)

2022– Research Fellow & Janet Dora Hine Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
I am currently a full-time researcher in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, and a collaborative fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, where I co-lead the Ecological Emotions Research Lab with Associate Professor Paul Rhodes. I sit on the SSPS Research Committee and am the School ECR Representative on the Faculty EMCR Committee.
2018–22 Research Fellow, School of Humanities, University of Sydney
I was a research fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney, working on histories of planetary health, depth psychology, and human ecology.
2013-18 Research Assistant/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

Name

Email

Message

Comment

School of Social and Political Sciences
Social Sciences Building A02
University of Sydney NSW 2006
james.dunk@sydney.edu.au
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
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
Reviews

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. [...] 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.
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.
Grace Karskens in Australian Historical Studies
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’. 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.
Stephen Garton in Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
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.
Christopher Mayes in Health and History
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.

Image: a128859h V1 Har S Hd 3 View of the Heads, Port Jackson, ca. 1817-1826 by Richard Read Snr, held by State Library of New South Wales
Editing work

Hans Pols, Tending to the Nation: Medicine, Nationalism and Decolonisation in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia, manuscript submitted to Cambridge University Press [Editor]

Warwick Anderson, Barbara Brookes and Miranda Johnson, eds. Pacific Futures: Past and Present, in preparation for University of Hawai’i Press [Copy-editor]

Warwick Anderson and Ricardo Roque, eds., special issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies [Copy-editor]

Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Durham: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) [Proofreading and Index]
@JamesHDunk
About
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered

Towards a planetary mental health
IN THE FACE OF DEVELOPING ECOLOGICAL CRISES, argued Anthony McMichael in 1990, the real driver of action would be human health, and those who wished to protect it would need to learn to ‘anticipate the future’. That perspective has given way to planetary health, a complex, globally framed epidemiology – or a human ecology pressed by crisis conditions into urgent focus on health outcomes. The new field looks to build a sufficient evidence basis for the radical reconfiguration of agriculture, energy, transportation, housing, and other systems in a deteriorating planetary environment – to protect human health by preserving the health of natural planetary systems. While advocates emphasise the significance of mental health within their framework, early projects and outcomes under its rubric have concentrated on physical health. One reason for this may be that the systems thinking which underpins the field has led to profound challenges when applied to psychological problems.

This historical project traces the emergence of ‘planetary mental health’ formulations from the 1980s, when psychiatrists and psychologists active in the medical antinuclear advocacy movement formed their own organisations. They studied not only the potential psychological effects of nuclear war (as their peers did with bodily effects), but the psychology of living under its threat, especially as it presented in children. Some, inspired by developments in systems thinking, went further, investigating the psychological factors which had produced and continued to sustain weapons of such unruly power, diagnosing forms of psychopathology, or ‘nuclear madness’. As the Cold War drew to a close, these researchers applied the frameworks they had developed to the ecological crisis revealed by the landmark UN World Commission on Environment and Development, and begun to map the health effects of deteriorating planetary systems. Drawing on the interdisciplinary insights of human ecology, psychological researchers presented a challenging hypothesis under the banner of ‘ecopsychology’ which prefigured later discussions of the ‘anthropocene’. Humans, they argued, by imagining themselves separate from other species, had developed a fundamental psychopathology, of which the destruction of their ‘life-support systems’ was a deadly symptom and testament. So too the anxiety, despair and ‘solastalgia’ which appear increasingly endemic in the anthropocene are symptoms not only of environmental deterioration but of that fundamental dislocation.

This project will compare the planetary health and global mental health frameworks with these insights from human ecology and ecopsychology to explore the vectors and boundaries of the systems thinking which has become increasingly dominant in biomedical thinking since the mid-twentieth century, and the disciplinary resistance to overarching questions – about human selves and the species – which have emerged both from the study of deep evolutionary time and from the modelling of deteriorating futures.

Dr James Dunk

Reviews, essays & interviews

narrowneck: a communal photo essay & a wordweave

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

psychiatry and its discontents

worth fighting for

the cabin in the woods

Bedlam at Botany Bay

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

Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020

Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards 2020

Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020

News

Overwhelm: Ecological emotions and the climate crisis

SEI Magazine Issue 7 (2022–23)

An Earth Lexicon for Children

Stories of the City

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

Planetary health and history

From settler psychology to new visions of health in the Anthropocene

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 psychology

Mapping the conceptual history of planetary mental health

Within the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts, led by 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 psychology

Memories of the Future, vol II

An evening of stories and music, held in September 2022

Academic books & articles

Books

Articles & Book Chapters

Co-edited Special Issues & Sections

Book and Exhibition Reviews

Essays & literary reviews

Essays and other writing

Book Reviews

Film Reviews

Brief resume

BA (Adv Hons I) PhD (Sydney)

2022– Research Fellow & Janet Dora Hine Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney

2018–22 Research Fellow, School of Humanities, University of Sydney

2013-18 Research Assistant/Research Associate, University of Sydney

Awards

Grants and Fellowships

Contact

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.

Reviews

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

Judge's Comments, Ernest Scott Prize 2020

Grace Karskens in Australian Historical Studies

Stephen Garton in Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society

Christopher Mayes in Health and History

Editing work

@JamesHDunk

About

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered

Towards a planetary mental health