Authors

Haripriya Rangan

Priya is Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Australia India Institute, and Principal Fellow in the School of Geography at University of Melbourne. Her research specialties include movements of plants across the Indian Ocean to Australia prior to British settlement, the political ecology of acacia exchanges around the Indian ocean and the social geographies of the marketplace trade. [Profile; email]

 

Christian Kull

Christian is Associate Professor in the Centre for Geography and Environmental Science, in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and Professor at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).  He is a geographer and political ecologist with particular interest in the social dimensions of environmental change.  He investigates the management of natural resources (particularly in developing countries) and current and historical conflicts over resource management issues like fire, biodiversity conservation, and invasive species. [Profile; email]

 

Charlie Shackleton

Charlie occupies a South African Research Chair in “Interdisciplinary Science in Land and Natural Resource Use for Sustainable Livelihoods” and is based at Rhodes University.  He is interested in the links between landscapes, biological resources and peoples’ uses thereof. [Profile; email]

 

 

Nitin Rai

Nitin is a researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), in Bangalore, India. [Profile; email]

 

 

Daniel Murphy

Dan is a molecular systematist (systematic botanist) at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, whose research primarily involves the use of DNA sequencing to investigate questions about the classification and biogeography of flowering plants. Dan has a particular interest in legumes, having worked extensively on Acacia and related genera, and also works on the biogeography of Persoonia; Adansonia and Vachellia (Acacia) farnesiana. (his RBG web page here).

Karen Bell

Karen is a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, and previously at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne and Monash University.  Her research investigates the evolution of plants and insects, using methods including phylogeography, phylogenetics and DNA barcoding. (her Emory webpage here)

 

 

Tom Bach

Tom is a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. He recently completed his PhD at Monash University looking at Aboriginal people’s perspectives of environmental weed management in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. He is interested in the ways in which people, plants and places interact and how these interactions shape formal and informal environmental and cultural management.

Pat Lowe

Pat – an author, baobab specialist, and environmentalist – is our ‘cultural attaché’ and lives in Broome, Western Australia. (her Backroom Press profile page here)

 

 

Manuel Fernandes

Manuel is a doctoral student in the Centre of Studies on Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Porto, Portugal.  His PhD thesis is at the cross-point of three related fields of study: historical geography, phytogeography and political ecology. It focuses on human-mediated transfers of Acacia (s. l.) species, including Acacia farnesiana, a plant species of Mesoamerican origin cultivated in Southwest Europe since the early seventeenth century.