Books

Monographs

A World in a Shell

(MIT Press, 2022)
“Anyone who has ever wondered how small beings matter should read this book. Thom van Dooren tells the histories of endangered Hawaiian tree snails, showing us their beauty, their diversity, their importance to Indigenous Hawaiians, and the social worlds they create through slime. Yet predation and habitat destruction make species disappear—for all time—every day. A World in a Shell is a lyrical elegy, as moving and beautifully written as a poem.”

~ Anna Tsing, University of California at Santa Cruz

The Wake of Crows

(Columbia University Press, 2019)
The Wake of Crows is a thoughtful and captivating book that opens our imagination. In this book van Dooren shows us that accepting the challenge to coexist with crows without dreaming that they will come to behave as a loyal and grateful companion species, might teach us priceless lessons at a time when we need to learn how to make room for many different, sometimes inconvenient, but so very interesting, others.”

~ Isabelle Stengers, Université libre de Bruxelles


Flight Ways

(Columbia University Press, 2014)
“I love this book. van Dooren’s thorough, detailed, and calmly passionate scholarship adds immensely to my understanding of caring, science and justice, and conditions for recuperation that take multispecies flourishing seriously. He is a leader in learning to learn without the tools of human exceptionalism, attuned to the nuances and specificities of situated worlds, including human worlds-in-relation with other critters.”

~ Donna Haraway, University of California at Santa Cruz

Vulture

(Reaktion Books, 2011)
“Thom van Dooren crafts a heartfelt defence of the scavenger birds. He finds beauty and nobility in everything, from their acidic digestive tracts, which make them invulnerable even to anthrax, to their collective ability to skeletonize a ritually presented human corpse in an hour . . . captivating.”

~ Times Literary Supplement


Co-authored Books

A Guide to the Creatures in Your Neighbourhood

(Murdoch Books, 2022)
Tune in to the richness and diversity in your local environment with this playful, quirky guide that’s packed with interactive projects, nature writing and sketching activities.

“Certain to convert you into a budding backyard David Attenborough.”

~ Indira Naidoo, author of The Space Between the Stars


Edited Books

Kin

(Duke University Press, 2022)
“Deborah Bird Rose created an expansive scholarly field underpinned by interconnections, the affirmation of life, and love and responsibility as analytics. Invited to such challenging field, the stories in this book carefully labor across a heterogeneity of forms of life and nonlife to reshuffle biological, political, and historical boundaries and creatively open possibility for a plethora of interconnected differences, pragmatic boundaries without a center. Caring for the Earth as country, this artfully crafted collection meets Rose’s most urgent demand: becoming a witness of death that asserts life through an ethical practice that is always already ecological.”

~ Marisol de la Cadena, University of California at Davis

Extinction Studies

(Columbia University Press, 2017)
“This extraordinary collection addresses one of the most sobering aspects of the current environmental crisis. The contributing scholars use narrative as the vehicle for their historical, ethnographic, zoological, meditative, and poetic insights. The result is both personal and scholarly, both illuminating and a pleasure to read.”

~ Harriet Ritvo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Translations

For a full list of translations of my books, please see this page.