Alexander Clayton
Assistant Professor
BIO
Alexander Clayton is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental History at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2024. Before arriving in the United States, he worked as an Assistant Curator of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He received his MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art in London and his undergraduate degree in History from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Clayton’s research and teaching explore the fields of environmental history, the history of science, and the public humanities. His courses encourage students to examine the experiences of plants, animals, microbes, and people, and think through how colonial histories continue to shape our environment today. Applying his background in museums, he invites students to enrich these histories by producing exhibits, analyzing objects, and engaging with the environments around them.
His current book project, The Living Animal: Menageries and the Nature of Empire, examines the global trade and display of animal life. By tracing the history of zoology within the British Empire, it shows how animal collecting rested on colonization, Indigenous knowledge, and the networks and labor of the slave trade. The Living Animal reveals how imperial powers attempted to manipulate living things into commodities and scientific objects, as well as the ways in which biting, thinking, and resistant animals came to disrupt human systems of knowledge and governance.
Clayton’s article on the nineteenth-century giraffe trade was published in Atlantic Studies in 2024 and received the World History Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize for 2023. His essay on eighteenth-century displays of animal intelligence received the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for 2022, and forms part of a second book project on understandings of mimicry, camouflage, and creativity in the natural world. Clayton’s research has received fellowships and awards from over twenty institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, British Library, and Royal Society. In 2023–4, he was a yearlong dissertation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Bio
Alexander Clayton is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental History at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2024. Before arriving in the United States, he worked as an Assistant Curator of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He received his MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art in London and his undergraduate degree in History from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Clayton’s research and teaching explore the fields of environmental history, the history of science, and the public humanities. His courses encourage students to examine the experiences of plants, animals, microbes, and people, and think through how colonial histories continue to shape our environment today. Applying his background in museums, he invites students to enrich these histories by producing exhibits, analyzing objects, and engaging with the environments around them.
His current book project, The Living Animal: Menageries and the Nature of Empire, examines the global trade and display of animal life. By tracing the history of zoology within the British Empire, it shows how animal collecting rested on colonization, Indigenous knowledge, and the networks and labor of the slave trade. The Living Animal reveals how imperial powers attempted to manipulate living things into commodities and scientific objects, as well as the ways in which biting, thinking, and resistant animals came to disrupt human systems of knowledge and governance.
Clayton’s article on the nineteenth-century giraffe trade was published in Atlantic Studies in 2024 and received the World History Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize for 2023. His essay on eighteenth-century displays of animal intelligence received the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for 2022, and forms part of a second book project on understandings of mimicry, camouflage, and creativity in the natural world. Clayton’s research has received fellowships and awards from over twenty institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, British Library, and Royal Society. In 2023–4, he was a yearlong dissertation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.