Vanessa Bateman researches human-animal histories across visual culture, environmental history, history of science, and museum studies from the 19th century to the present. From 2025-2027 she is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Trent University (Canada), and was a Postdoctoral Researcher for the project "Moving Animals: A History of Science, Media, and Policy in the 20th Century" at Maastricht University (Netherlands). Vanessa was a recipient of the 2024/25 ESEH-Gale Fellowship in Digital Environmental History from the European Society for Environmental History.

 

Her book (tentatively titled) Birds in Focus and Frequency: A Media History of Conservation examines the intersection of visual media and grassroots environmentalism in the 20th century.

 

Together with Raf De Bont and Tom Quick, she is co-editor of Globalizing Wildlife (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

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Vanessa holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California San Diego with a Specialization in Anthropogeny from the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA).