Wild Things. Nature and the Social Imagination

William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. His environmental history publications include The Rise of Conservation in South Africa (2003), Social History and African Environments (ed. with JoAnn McGregor, 2003), Environment and Empire (with Lotte Hughes, 2007) and, with Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: the Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape (2011). He is currently working on the history of wildlife film and photography in Africa and, with Karen Brown, on local knowledge about livestock management and veterinary ideas in rural South Africa. Dr Karen Middleton is an independent researcher with expertise on Madagascar. She has published analyses of kinship and ritual in the island's deep south, where she lived for several years. A Nuffield Foundation research fellowship enabled her to train in environmental history, since when she has drawn on archival research, oral history and continuing ethnographic fieldwork to explore the historical ecology of southern Madagascar, focusing on the cultural and economic dimensions of plant transfer. Dr Simon Pooley is a Junior Research Fellow at Imperial College Conservation Science, working on an environmental history of crocodilian conservation in southern Africa, Australia, India and the USA. His doctoral research (University of Oxford) was on the environmental history of wild fire in South Africa. He has published on Dutch colonial environmental history, forestry and fire and invasive plants in South Africa, in Environment & History and elsewhere.