Libby Robin is a Curator-at-Large, historian of science and writer. She has worked with museums in Australia, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and Norway, exploring the way museums and art can enable ordinary people to engage with big ideas like climate change and the Anthropocene.
She is co-author (with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin) of The Environment: A History of the Idea and many other books, including Curating the Future (which she co-edited with Jenny Newell and Kirsten Wehner). Libby is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her next book, ‘What Birdo is That?’, is about the role of ‘bird people’ in conservation in Australia. It will be published in 2023 by Melbourne University Publishing.
During her stay Robin will participate at the workshop on Antarctica and Rights of Nature event at Lysebu, hosted by Alejandra Mancilla and Peder Roberts (24-26 August) as a commentator. Furthermore as a member of the Anthropogenic Soils collaboratory and member of the SOILS advisory board, Libby Robins will hold the inaugural lecture Growing the Environment out of the Soil on the 29th of August. In the lecture she will review the emergence of the idea of the environment in the wake of the ‘dirty thirties’, a time when topsoil blew away – in both Australia and in the United States, and the hope of ‘feeding the world’ was threatened. How can personal engagement with planetary health restore human health and the well-being of more-than-human others?