Dr. Chanelle Adams is a researcher, writer and artist preoccupied by asking questions in/of/with places and entities, particularly in relation to change, crisis, and disturbance.
Adams is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She also has a PhD in Geography from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), and degrees in Science and Society Studies from Brown University (USA) and Comparative Research in Anthropology, History, and Sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (France), where she was a Fulbright scholar.
She both leans into, and resists her interdisciplinary training, through a multi-faceted practice across history, healing and haunt. Concerned with how botanical and zoological life become known, classified, circulated, and made legible across uneven histories of empire, crisis, and change. Working with the history of science, political ecology, and environmental humanities, and with particular attention to Madagascar and the wider Indian Ocean world, she traces the material and immaterial afterlives of plants, animals, and other entities through archives, laboratories, markets, museums, and landscapes.
Grounded in the understanding that historical investigation exceeds the written archive, her approach includes public practice. Her site-specific performative walks staged in gardens, parks, natural history museums, and other public spaces, invite participants to sit with layered histories of colonialism, ecocide, and capitalism that haunt seemingly ordinary landscapes. These works have been presented internationally, including at the Kampnagel Summer Festival in Hamburg, as well as in Marseille, Antananarivo, Cape Town, Basel, and Lausanne. In 2025, she was awarded the Bristol–Bern Prize for Public Environmental History by the European Society for Environmental History.
She has also widely published, and her work can be read in magazines and platforms such as The Drift, e-flux, Adi Magazine, and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as well as in exhibition catalogues and independent publishing projects. She is co-editor of Earthly Delights, a sold-out zine on botanical culture, and regularly translates from French to English for The Funambulist.
