Research & Writing

Dr Amanda Wells

My research explores how people, places, and more-than-human worlds have been shaped together over time, with a focus on Australian environmental and agricultural histories. I’m particularly interested in how landscapes are made and remade through labour, science, infrastructure, and everyday relationships with land, water, plants, and animals.

Much of my work is place-based and archival, grounded in regional Australia and attentive to historical specificity. Alongside academic research and writing, I’m committed to forms of scholarship that travel beyond the academy — including public history, collaborative projects, and research that supports teaching, policy, and community engagement.

Research Themes

Environmental & agricultural history

Place, region, and landscape

Multispecies and more-than-human approaches

Publications

November 2025Citrus Worlds: a More-Than-Human History of Citrus Growing and the Riverland Region, 1948-1970.
PhD Dissertation, University of Newcastle, Australia.
February 2025Transdisciplinary Histories and the Rise of the Environmental Humanities
Global Environment 2025
Libby Robin, Amanda Wells, Claudia Leal, Joana Baço, Cristina Brito, Patricia Carvalho, Susanna Lidström, Tirza Meyer, Ursula Münster, Kate Rigby, Sandra Swart, and Nina Vieira.
July 2025Halting Chowilla Dam: salt, science, and River Murray politics in the 1960s.
History Australia 2025
forthcoming 2026Citrus Queens: Selling Produce, Place, and Gender in 1950s and 1960s Riverland Communities.
May 2024Riverland: Brand to Region.
Chapter in Nooks and Crannies: Stories of South Australia
March 2024Review of Asdal & Huse, Nature-made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
2023Review of da Silva & de Majo (eds), The Age of the Soybean: An Environmental History of Soy During the Great Acceleration. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. 
Review of Hore, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
October 2022‘Place of Spirits’: Persistence and Deep-Time Entanglements in Colonised Place. Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) Blog.