Room 278
Chanelle Adams received her PhD in Geography from the University of Lausanne. She investigates how botanical and zoological materials are gathered, classified, transformed, or abandoned, and how their value and meaning are produced or lost within contexts shaped by colonialism, extractivism, environmental change, and uncertainty.
Her doctoral dissertation analyzed the introduction of the ravintsara tree (Cinnamomum camphora) to Madagascar and the distillation, use, and export of its anti-viral essential oil and traced the oil's volatile materiality and meanings during global health crises. She is developing a book project on essential oil extraction in Madagascar and the apparatuses, techniques, and knowledge that sustain aromatic and medicinal plant markets.
At the MPIWG, Chanelle is a postdoctoral scholar in the “Reclaiming Turtles All the Way Down” Working Group. Her project, “Turtles of Time: Extinction, Cosmology, and the Epistemic Afterlives of Giant Tortoises in the Southwest Indian Ocean,” draws on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century seafaring and colonial archives, alongside ethnographic and oral-historical approaches, to examine how turtles have come to inform articulations of temporal scales and ecological loss.
Chanelle is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award and the 2025 Bristol-Bern Prize in Public Environmental History from the European Society for Environmental History.
