Bio
Joanne Yao is Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe
Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary, University of London
Joanne Yao is currently a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, she taught at Durham University and the LSE, where she completed her PhD in 2017. In addition, she has worked in the US public sector and for international nongovernmental organizations including CARE International.
Her research centers on environmental history and politics, historical international relations, international hierarchies and orders, and the development of early international organizations. Her first book,
The Ideal River (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines the construction of the ‘ideal river’ in the European geographical imagination and the establishment of the first international organizations. Joanne’s next project focuses on the history of Antarctica and early outer space exploration.
Joanne was also one of three editors of
Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 43 (2014-2015) and is currently a member of
Millennium’s Board of Trustees.
Courses
- Global Environmental Politics
In recent years, environmental considerations have become increasingly important for how we think about politics and policy at the local, national, and international levels. Much has been said on how we should address our troubled relationship with nature – from advice to individuals on what to buy and how to behave, to recommendations at the international level on how to cooperate and take collective action. This course takes a step back from the headlines to consider a more complex and critical analysis of how we arrived at our current environmental predicaments. The course begins with a discussion on the Anthropocene and introduces theoretical tools with which to understand global environmental politics. Analysis of global hierarchies of gender, race, and economic development are interwoven throughout. The second half of the course focuses on policymaking by international, regional, and nonstate actors and culminates in a climate simulation in the final week.
