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I’m an Australian writer, teacher and ceramicist living in New York, where I am faculty in Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

My work — in writing, ceramics, and other media — revolves around two basic questions.

1. Why, if given the choice between trying to embed more deeply in our world and trying to escape, do human beings so often choose escape?

2. How can teaching, storytelling, and imagination help us practice other ways of living on Earth?

writing · making · teaching · contactClose

writing

I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and academic political theory.

Fiction
In fiction, I approach similar themes through character, place, and story. My first novel, Ruin Country, is set in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. It is a coming-of-age story about two boys, a drought, a fire, and what we owe to the places and people that formed us. In 2026, the manuscript was selected for the Queensland Writers’ Center’s “Adaptable: Turning the Page to Screen” program. Read the prologue and first two chapters.

My second novel, in progress, follows five characters as they grapple with an immortality technology. Each character embodies a different relationship to mortality, vulnerability and grief. The novel moves between speculative and realist modes, and is concerned with technological ambition and ecological loss.

Creative nonfiction
In creative nonfiction, I work on essays exploring what it takes to stay with what overwhelms us, instead of trying to escape or arbitrarily resolve it. Some essays are place-based, moving through landscapes like Australia’s Flinders Ranges, the US Canyonlands, and the South American Andes, and drawing on diverse intellectual traditions as means of remaining. Read one essay, “Thinking Country” (Dark Mountain 11), here.

Political theory
In political theory, I examine how ideas about humans, nature, and technology shape the ways we imagine the future. My doctoral dissertation, On Human Separatism, traced a lineage of thinkers from Plato to contemporary Silicon Valley who suggest that technology can free humanity from ecological limits and shared vulnerability. Work from this and other academic projects has appeared in Political Theory, Environmental Philosophy, the Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, and elsewhere. Read here my most-cited piece, “Three Types of Anthropocentrism”, from the 2018 edition of Environmental Philosophy.

My current book project — Earthly Imaginations — uses stories to explain ideas and methods from environmental political theory so that people from a broad range of backgrounds can understand and utilise these in their communities.

making

Ceramics
Ceramics is my primary making practice. My ceramics work explores the relationship between humans, books, memory, and the natural world. My current focus is a series in speculative design titled Texts from the Future. It consists of ruined books recovered from an imagined future planet other than Earth. I handbuild the books in porcelain and then wreck them in various ways — drowning, burning, encrusting, etc. Each carries a title (some examples are An Interpretation of An Animal Dreams, What to Expect When You're Trapped in a Malfunctioning Airlock) and is meant to gesture at an entire imaginative, social, and ecological world.

Work from the series has been exhibited in New York and California. Use the arrows (or swipe) to see a selection of pieces.

Texts from the Future (2023 – ): Constitution of the Free State of …; The Terraforming of Reason, 2232–2243; Extinct and Exiled Fauna of the Plexaris Macrobiome; The Collected Journals of the Achibie/Wong Expedition; Lectures in Interspecific Fascism for Idiots; An Interpretation of An Animal Dreams.

Synthetic photography
More recently, I have also become interested in synthetic photography as a means to investigate the ethics and politics of AI image generation. My current project, Gazeless, aims to prompt questions about whose photographs AI models learn from, and whether their subjects consented; what a model assumes about a child in a given place and decade; what a photograph can still document when no real person is in it; and what it means to feel nostalgia or grief for people who do not exist. The current series, Gazeless: Childhood, is composed of polaroid portraits of imaginary children generated and redacted using standardised Midjourney prompts. Use the arrows (or swipe) to see a selection of pieces.

Gazeless: Childhood (2025 – ). Images all synthetic. Prompted “provenances”: Greece, 1960s; Syria, 1960s; Mauritius, 1970s; Norway, 1980s; Canyonlands, 1980s; Midtown NYC, 1990s.

teaching

My teaching is in environmental studies, political theory, and law. My aim is to invite students to consider how we understand the human place in the world, and what that understanding demands of us.

I view teaching as a chance to explore a landscape together, and develop a theoretical and practical map that lets students feel equipped to move through it themselves. Some want the whole map; others find a side canyon and set up camp; some decide the map is wrong and try to redraw it. Through reading, writing, and critical conversation, I hope that my students find themselves able to develop capacities and vocabularies for connecting ideas to their own lives and pursuing their hopes and projects in the world.

Courses I teach at Sarah Lawrence College include Humans, Nature, Future; The Politics of Crisis and Belonging; Environmental Writing Past and Present; and Will Technology Save the World?

I also helped found what is now the Climate Imaginarium on Governors Island, NYC: a community of artists, scholars, and practitioners working to imagine more just environmental futures.

contact

If something here resonates, feel free to be in touch.

I’m glad to hear from readers, editors, students, and colleagues. I’m especially open to invitations to speak or teach, to writing and editorial projects, and to conversations about the ceramics and photographic work above.

Moab, Utah

Front-page photo (Kolmanskop): Philipp Klausner

Ben Mylius