Alex Clayton
Assistant Professor
- Ph.D in History from the University of Michigan (2024)
- M.A in History of Design from the Royal College of Art, London (2018)
- M.A (Honours) in History from the University of St Andrews, Scotland (2016)
BIO
Alexander Clayton is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental History at ¶¶Ňő̽̽. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2024. Before arriving in the United States, he worked as an Assistant Curator of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Dr. Clayton’s research and teaching explore the fields of environmental history, the history of science, and the public humanities. His courses encourage students to examine the experiences of plants, animals, microbes, and people, and think through how colonial histories continue to shape our environment today. Applying his background in museums, he invites students to enrich these histories by producing exhibits, analyzing objects, and engaging with the environments around them. At the introductory level, he teaches the Global Environmental History survey. His intermediate courses cover various topics in environmental history, including the History of Extinction, Nature and Empire, and the Global History of Science.
Dr. Clayton's current book project, The Living Animal: Menageries and the Nature of Empire, examines the global trade and display of animal life. By tracing the history of zoology within the British Empire, it shows how animal collecting rested on colonization, Indigenous knowledge, and the networks and labor of the slave trade. The Living Animal reveals how imperial powers attempted to manipulate living things into commodities and scientific objects, as well as the ways in which biting, thinking, and resistant animals came to disrupt human systems of knowledge and governance.
Clayton’s article on the nineteenth-century giraffe trade was published in Atlantic Studies in 2024 and received the World History Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize for 2023. His essay on eighteenth-century displays of animal intelligence received the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for 2022, and forms part of a second book project on understandings of mimicry, camouflage, and creativity in the natural world. Clayton’s research has received fellowships and awards from over twenty institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, British Library, and Royal Society. In 2023–4, he was a yearlong fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Courses
HST 1670: Global Environmental History
This introductory course examines the relationship between human societies and natural environments, tracing their interactions from the Paleolithic era to the present. Students will be introduced to the basic principles, concepts, and scholarship of environmental history, and learn how climates, landscapes, plants, animals, and microorganisms have shaped—and been shaped by—the human world. Assignments will invite students to analyze objects, organisms, and places, exploring their connections to the environmental histories of empire, industry, and globalization.
HST 2300: History of Extinction
We exist in an age of perpetual endings. Human activity threatens the future of countless landscapes, communities, and species, all while pandemics and environmental disasters strain our society in ever-more pressing ways. Students explore the history of these crises by examining how previous “endings” have been understood and experienced. This course examines how the threat and reality of eradication has operated as a powerful historical driving force, from prophecies of the apocalypse to the colonial destruction of peoples and landscapes. More recently, fears of decline and extinction have spurred both global collaboration and isolationist national agendas, movements that have shaped and divided our contemporary society. Written assignments ask students to present these histories to public audiences, tracing how past extinctions have been experienced, measured, prevented, and narrated.
HST 4300: Nonhuman Histories
History is an interspecies affair. Plants, animals, and microbes have played a pivotal role in forging the human past, yet they have been all too absent in its retellings. This seminar class explores the actions, influence, and perspectives of nonhuman actors, ranging from fish and mammals to fungi and AI. An investigation of these nonhuman pasts will takes students on a tour of Atlantic fisheries, Ghanaian uranium mines, and Chinese industrial wastelands, spanning the histories of whales, wolves, mosquitos, maple trees, and cyborgs. Each stop on this journey reveals how nonhumans have played a pivotal role in shaping the human past, disrupting the traditional human-centered methods of the historical discipline. These “more-than-human” or “posthuman” histories demand an interdisciplinary approach, and the class will engage with scholarship from environmental studies, critical race and ethnic studies, science and technology studies, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and disability studies to understand how the very category of the “human” has always been political, historically contingent, and entwined with nature.
Bio
Alexander Clayton is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental History at ¶¶Ňő̽̽. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2024. Before arriving in the United States, he worked as an Assistant Curator of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Dr. Clayton’s research and teaching explore the fields of environmental history, the history of science, and the public humanities. His courses encourage students to examine the experiences of plants, animals, microbes, and people, and think through how colonial histories continue to shape our environment today. Applying his background in museums, he invites students to enrich these histories by producing exhibits, analyzing objects, and engaging with the environments around them. At the introductory level, he teaches the Global Environmental History survey. His intermediate courses cover various topics in environmental history, including the History of Extinction, Nature and Empire, and the Global History of Science.
Dr. Clayton's current book project, The Living Animal: Menageries and the Nature of Empire, examines the global trade and display of animal life. By tracing the history of zoology within the British Empire, it shows how animal collecting rested on colonization, Indigenous knowledge, and the networks and labor of the slave trade. The Living Animal reveals how imperial powers attempted to manipulate living things into commodities and scientific objects, as well as the ways in which biting, thinking, and resistant animals came to disrupt human systems of knowledge and governance.
Clayton’s article on the nineteenth-century giraffe trade was published in Atlantic Studies in 2024 and received the World History Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize for 2023. His essay on eighteenth-century displays of animal intelligence received the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for 2022, and forms part of a second book project on understandings of mimicry, camouflage, and creativity in the natural world. Clayton’s research has received fellowships and awards from over twenty institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, British Library, and Royal Society. In 2023–4, he was a yearlong fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Courses
HST 1670: Global Environmental History
This introductory course examines the relationship between human societies and natural environments, tracing their interactions from the Paleolithic era to the present. Students will be introduced to the basic principles, concepts, and scholarship of environmental history, and learn how climates, landscapes, plants, animals, and microorganisms have shaped—and been shaped by—the human world. Assignments will invite students to analyze objects, organisms, and places, exploring their connections to the environmental histories of empire, industry, and globalization.
HST 2300: History of Extinction
We exist in an age of perpetual endings. Human activity threatens the future of countless landscapes, communities, and species, all while pandemics and environmental disasters strain our society in ever-more pressing ways. Students explore the history of these crises by examining how previous “endings” have been understood and experienced. This course examines how the threat and reality of eradication has operated as a powerful historical driving force, from prophecies of the apocalypse to the colonial destruction of peoples and landscapes. More recently, fears of decline and extinction have spurred both global collaboration and isolationist national agendas, movements that have shaped and divided our contemporary society. Written assignments ask students to present these histories to public audiences, tracing how past extinctions have been experienced, measured, prevented, and narrated.
HST 4300: Nonhuman Histories
History is an interspecies affair. Plants, animals, and microbes have played a pivotal role in forging the human past, yet they have been all too absent in its retellings. This seminar class explores the actions, influence, and perspectives of nonhuman actors, ranging from fish and mammals to fungi and AI. An investigation of these nonhuman pasts will takes students on a tour of Atlantic fisheries, Ghanaian uranium mines, and Chinese industrial wastelands, spanning the histories of whales, wolves, mosquitos, maple trees, and cyborgs. Each stop on this journey reveals how nonhumans have played a pivotal role in shaping the human past, disrupting the traditional human-centered methods of the historical discipline. These “more-than-human” or “posthuman” histories demand an interdisciplinary approach, and the class will engage with scholarship from environmental studies, critical race and ethnic studies, science and technology studies, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and disability studies to understand how the very category of the “human” has always been political, historically contingent, and entwined with nature.
Office hours: Thursday 3:00–4:30pm.