Anthony Medrano is a historian of the Asian marine environment who studies the interplay between people and fish, science and society, and technology and nature.

Anthony earned a BA in political science from Humboldt State University, an MA from the University of Hawaii, and a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has also studied at the University of Indonesia and the National University of Malaysia, and held visiting fellowships at the University of Malaysia-Sabah and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. Based on two years of fieldwork in Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, Anthony's dissertation explains why fish and the people who studied them were central to the emergence of modern Asia. He combines archival material with ethnographic research to show how science and industry opened the Southeast Asian shelf, thereby producing a protein boom that fed and fueled the rise of urban society, plantation agriculture, and imperial expansion in the interwar period.

As an Environmental Fellow, Anthony worked with Sunil Amrith from the Department of History. He revised his dissertation for publication and commence a second project on the edible ocean in the age of climate change. Looking specifically at how Southeast Asian publics adapted their food cultures to shifting supplies of ocean produce, Anthony hopes to historicize local understandings of and responses to marine environmental change in the long twentieth century.

Faculty Host

Sunil Amrith, Department of History