Rate My Professor Nancy Cushing

Her research specializations encompass environmental history and Australian history, with particular focus on human-animal relations, more-than-human histories, coal and energy transition, statues and memorialisation, and urban history. Current projects include A New History of Australia in 15 Animals for Bloomsbury and a more-than-human history of Sydney funded by the Coral Thomas Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales (2024–25). Key publications include Snake-bitten: Eric Worrell and the Australian Reptile Park (with Kevin Markwell, UNSW Press, 2010), Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (edited with Jodie Frawley, Routledge, 2018), A History of Crime in Australia (2023), Smoky City: A History of Air Pollution in Newcastle, NSW (with Bridgman H, 2015), and Radical Newcastle: Unearthing the Radical Past and Present of Newcastle and the Hunter Region (with Bennett JE and Eklund E, 2015). Notable articles and chapters feature '#CoalMustFall: Revisiting Newcastle’s Coal Monument in the Anthropocene' (2021), 'The Interspecies Entanglements of Eating Kangaroo, 1788–1850' (2016), and 'Carbon Old and New: The Australian Agricultural Company, Coal, Wood and the Complexities of Energy Transition in New South Wales, 1825–1847' (2024). Cushing provides media commentary on statues, captive and native animals, energy transition emotional toll, and Newcastle history.