Melanie Challenger researches and writes on environmental history, history and philosophy of science, and the relationship of humans to the living world.
Biography
Her first non-fiction book On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature was published in 2011. It was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 and received the Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing.
“Surely the most poetic book on the environment published this year” (Roger Cox, Scotsman’s Books of the Year).
She was the recipient of a Darwin Now Award for her research in the Canadian Arctic and the International Fellowship with British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling.
From 2007-2010, she was a Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London.
Prior to this, she also edited Stolen Voices, an anthology of young people’s wartime diaries with Bosnian writer Zlata Filipovic.
More recently, she has focused on environmental history, history and philosophy of science, and bioethics.
She has been a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities and a visiting fellow in the Philosophy Department of Durham University. In philosophy, her interests are across environmental ethics and philosophy of biology. She is Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a Vice President of the RSPCA. As a founding member of CIRCE and the Animals in the Room project, she is involved in devising and evaluating new models for including and representing the interests of non-human life in decision-making arena.
She began her working life in the creative arts, in classical music and literature. Her first collection of poems, Galatea, won a 2005 Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has since published The Tender Map, illustrated by Rose Ferraby. In 2003, she adapted the Anne Frank diaries for a choral work by James Whitbourn. As the librettist for British composer Mark Simpson, she provided the text for his oratorio, The Immortal, which won the 2016 Sky Arts/South Bank Award for classical music and received its London premiere at the 2017 BBC Proms under Juanjo Mena. Their first opera together, Pleasure, was co-commissioned by Royal Opera House, Opera North and Aldeburgh Music. She and Mark are currently under commission for a new opera.
Melanie has written for publications such as New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, and BBC Science Focus. She has participated in a number of films, including the BBC series Nature & Us, and hosts the podcast series The Psychosphere. She is the author of How to Be Animal: What it means to be human (2021) and the editor of Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-human Existence (2023).
Research Interests
History and anthropology of science; environmental history; bioethics; environmental philosophy, particularly multispecies ethics; animal welfare; history of ideas.
Associations
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