Dr Emily O'GORMAN

Associate Research Fellow
Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER)

emilyo@uow.edu.au
ph: + 61 2 4221 5616
mob: +61 404384021
Location: 41.G10

Research Interests

I am an historian of environment, science, and culture. My research explores how people live in and understand their environments, with a particular focus on rivers, weather, and climate. I am especially interested in the changing environmental practices and knowledges of town and city dwellers, industry members (farmers, miners), managers and scientists (meteorologists, ecologists, industry technicians, engineers), as well as the institutions that connect them. My research examines both historical and contemporary changes in environmental understandings, their connections with specific places and the particular environmental experiences of actors. My research centres on two themes: Past, current and future river knowledge and management in Australia; and, the ways in which government and non-government scientists have conceptualised weather and climate from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.

Current Projects

• Histories and futures of food production and water use in the Murray and Darling river systems, focusing on rice growing in the Murrumbidgee River region
• Floods in the Murray and Darling river systems from 1850 to the present

Publications
 

Books

J. Beattie, E. O’Gorman, and M. Henry (eds.). (Forthcoming, 2014). Climate, Science and History in Australasia. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science & Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

J. Beattie, E. Melillo, and E. O’Gorman (eds.). (Forthcoming, 2014). Networks of Nature in the British Empire: New Views on Imperial Environmental History. Continuum, London and New York.

O’Gorman, E. (2012) Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin, Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing.

Journal Articles

E. O’Gorman. (2013). ‘Growing Rice on the Murrumbidgee River: Cultures, Politics, and Practices of Food Production and Water Use, 1900 to 2012’, Journal of Australian Studies, 37, 1, pp.96-115.

D. Rose, T. van Dooren, M. Chrulew, S. Cooke, M. Kearnes, and E. O’Gorman. (2012). ‘Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities’, Introduction to Environmental Humanities, 1, pp. 1-5.

O’Gorman, E. (2012) ‘Local Knowledge and the State: The 1990 Floods in Cunnamulla, Queensland, Australia’, Environmental History, 17, 3, pp.512-46. doi:10.1093/envhis/ems045

O'Gorman, E. (2010) 'Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods?: Regulation and Responsibility on the Murray River in the 1950s', Ecological Humanities in the Australian Humanities Review, 48.

O’Gorman, E. (2005) 'Colonial Meteorologists and Australia’s Variable Weather’, University of Queensland Historical Proceedings, 16, pp.67-88

Book Reviews

O’Gorman, E. (2011) ‘A Review of Droughts Floods and Cyclones: El Niños That Shaped Our Colonial Past by Don Garden’, Bulletin of the Pacific Circle.

O’Gorman, E. (2010) ‘A Review of Gardening the world: Agency, identity, and the ownership of water, by Veronica Strang’, Anthropological Forum, 20, 2, pp.205-7.

O’Gorman E. (2009) 'Review of Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia' (edited by Emily Potter, Alison Mackinnon, Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay), Australian Humanities Review, 46.

O’Gorman, E. (2007) 'Review of Libby Robin’s How a Continent Created a Nation' in Ecological Humanities: Australian Humanities Review, 42.

Academic affiliations

Foundation Member, Ecological Humanities Group www.ecologicalhumanities.org

Abbreviated CV

My doctoral studies were carried out in the School of History, Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University. My PhD dissertation (completed in 2009) explores floods in the Murray and Darling river systems, from 1850 to 2009.