Thomas Thornton

Thomas Thornton, as director for the MSc in Environmental Change and Management at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), oversees the course and teaches various options and modules. In addition, he is a senior research fellow at the ECI. His academic training is in social and cultural anthropology (BA Swarthmore College; MA, PhD University of Washington). Before going to Oxford in 2008, he taught at Portland State University, Trinity College, Saint Lawrence University, the University of Alaska, and Beijing Normal University (Fulbright Lectureship). He also worked in government as an environmental resource specialist and as a consultant to Native American tribes.His primary teaching and research interests are in human ecology, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, conservation, coastal and marine environments, conceptualizations of space and place, and the political ecology of resource management among the indigenous peoples of North America and the circumpolar North.