I am a historian and interdisciplinary researcher, and my research, teaching and writing explore how health and psychology are changing in the face of planetary crises. I am especially interested in how the lived experience of ecological change is beginning to reshape our psychological theories and therapies, with Australia at the forefront of new feeling and knowledge of living in a planetary age.
Currently a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, I lead the planetary mental health theme on the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts. I also co-direct the Ecological Emotion Research Lab and convene the Climate Distress, Art and Open Dialogue Community of Practice.
My first book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, won the Australian History Prize at the 2020 NSW Premier's History Awards and was shortlisted for several other prizes. My research on planetary health, mental health and ecological distress has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Sustainability, History of Psychology, Australian Psychologist and Rethinking History, and my literary reviews and essays appear in Griffith Review, Australian Book Review, and other places.
Winner, Australian History Prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020
Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020
Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards 2020
Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020
"Bedlam at Botany Bay offers readers a strikingly original re-reading of early colonial Australia. Beautifully crafted and deeply empathetic, this is a book with genuine literary and scholarly merit. It makes a significant and invigorating impact on the field of Australian history, and deserves to be read and discussed for many years to come." – Judge's Comments, New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020
"by insisting that we should examine trauma and madness in their wider social contexts, by voyaging into emotional history and the predicaments of both the insane and the people who cared for them, James Dunk has opened promising new ways to understand the histories of empires and colonies." – Grace Karskens
Overwhelm: Ecological emotions and the climate crisis
SEI Magazine Issue 7 (2022–23)
Following the Nature Feelz symposium which my Sydney Environment Institute colleagues and I convened late in 2022, this issue of the SEI magazine explores the complex ecological emotions and feelings that drive climate crisis and action. It brings together a diverse range of contributions and disciplines, both critical and creative, to highlight the cutting-edge ecological emotion research and responses focused in and around Australia. From reflections on environmental fiction as it becomes more aligned to reality, and photographic explorations of climate loss, to a manifesto for resilience as form of activism, Overwhelmed delves into loss and hope, witnessing and action as we collectively experience the affective impacts of the climate crisis.
Current projects
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](//custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_1/946235/476061_190262.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
At a loss for words of loss
An experiment in slow, transformative collaboration
See our photo essay, 'Narrowneck,' and audio poem published in the NiCHE series Emotional Ecologies.
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](//custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_1/946235/500980_10802.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered
Towards a planetary psychology
Research article published in APA journal History of Psychology
Image: Wikimedia Commons: Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima_(from Matsuyama) 509th Operations Group
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](//custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_1/946235/100370_681589.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Mapping the conceptual history of planetary mental health
Within the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts, led by the University of Sydney, Monash University, and KTH Stockholm
Image: NASA/USGS Landsat; Geoscience Australia. Source: Landsat gallery.![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](//custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_1/946235/57223_304353.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Climate Distress
An open intergenerational dialogue between young people, scholars, writers, artists, and clinicians
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: towards a planetary psychology
This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are concerned with global environmental change, including conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and climate psychology. Focusing on a network of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers based at a research center founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, the article explores what those who first turned to the psychological causes and implications of climate change and other kinds of global environmental disruption had learned from their studies of nuclear-era psychology. The explorations of these researchers and practitioners in systems psychology, depth psychology, and political psychology, elicited by the first truly planetary crisis of the modern world, the threat of general nuclear war, were applied to a new planetary crisis already unfolding: global environmental degradation.
As they completed this pivot from the nuclear threat to the environmental crisis, at the end of the Cold War, using the language of the psychology of survival, these researchers displayed the form and function of what might be called a planetary psychology – of psychological theory and practice which broaches the planetary context of the individual psyche.
Dunk, J. (2022). Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: Nuclear threat, environmental crisis, and the emergence of planetary psychology. History of Psychology, 25(2), 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000208
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/476061_190262.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/500980_10802.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/100370_681589.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/57223_304353.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
