Series 322 - Papers of Val Plumwood

Val Plumwood was born on 11 August 1939 in Terry Hills, Sydney. She started her first year of Philosophy at Sydney University in 1956 which she resumed in the 1960s. She then held intermittent teaching posts at Macquarie University, Sydney; Murdoch University, Perth; the University of Tasmania; North Carolina State University and the University of Montana. During the seventies Plumwood and philosopher Richard Routley (later Sylvan) published numerous papers in logic and in environmental ethics. She was author of four books: The Fight for the Forests (1973) with Richard Routley, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals (1982) with R Routley, R K Meyer & Ross T Brady, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002). At her death she was working on two further manuscripts, The Eye of the Crocodile and Nature in the Active Voice. She completed her PhD thesis from the Australian National University in 1990 and was a member of the Social and Political Theory Program, Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. She held visiting professorships at the University of California-Berkeley in the US, McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, the University of Lancaster in the UK and the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Val was a Fellow at the Australian National University, first as an Australian Research Council fellow and later as a Visiting Fellow of the Fenner School of Environment & Society. Plumwood died in late February 2008 at her Plumwood Mountain property, near Braidwood, east of Canberra.