Richard Grove

Richard Hugh Grove (21 July 1955 – 25 June 2020) was a British historian, environmental activist, and one of the contemporary founders of environmental history as an academic field. His prizewinning book, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (1995), was considered a pioneering account of colonial environmental impacts and an origin for early western ideas on environmentalism. Life and work Grove was the son of Cambridge climatologists Alfred Thomas Grove and Jean Mary Grove, née Clark, and was married to historian Vinita Damodaran of the University of Sussex. Educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, his interdisciplinary training included a BA in geography from Hertford College, Oxford (1979), MSc in Conservation biology from University College London (1980) and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge (1988). Grove was a Fellow of Clare Hall, and College Lecturer at Churchill College, University of Cambridge (1988–1990 and 1991–1992). He also held visiting appointments at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University in Canberra and the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He spent a year at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC in the 1990s. Grove became Professor and founded the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex in May 2002. He received a five-year research appointment at the Australian National University in 2006, funded by an ARC Discovery fellowship, but was unable to complete it. In 2006, Grove suffered a very serious car accident in Cooma, Australia, on his way back from the Manning Clark property "Ness" on the far south coast of New South Wales, and had been severely incapacitated from that time.