Anthony D. Medrano is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Brown University as well as an affiliated faculty in the Science, Technology, and Society program. His teaching and scholarship revolve around the histories and legacies of economic life, scientific practice, and biodiversity research in Southeast Asia. At the heart of Medrano's pedagogical, public-facing, and scholarly work is a focus on the productions and circulations of local knowledge and cultural expertise--particularly about plants, fishes, and their uses and habitats. He's co-editor (with Eunice J. Tan and Tanisha Naqvi) of Wild Life: Stories of Singapore Biodiversity (2025), editor of Fishways (2025), and editor of Lala-Land: Singapore's Seafood Heritage (2024), which won the Juliet David Best Food Book Award in 2025. His book-in-progress, The Edible Ocean: Science, Industry, and the Rise of Urban Southeast Asia, which is under contract with Yale University Press, charts a history of the ocean through the story of fish. It draws on multilingual archives and ethnographic interviews to show how, and explain why, the city depended on the sea in the first half of the twentieth century and the ways in which this relationship became perilous in the wake of World War II. His recent work has appeared in the following edited volumes: Singaporean Plants (forthcoming), Halo-Halo Ecologies (2025), and Singaporean Creatures (2024).
Prior to joining Brown University in 2025, Medrano was the the National University of Singapore Presidential Young Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College, and an assistant professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. Before moving to Singapore, he was a Ziff environmental fellow at Harvard University.
Medrano continues to hold affiliations at the Asia Research Institute (Singapore) and the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (Singapore) while serving, too, as the current president of the Pacific Circle. He is a member of the Association for Asian Studies, History of Science Society, and the American Society for Environmental History. His degrees are from Humboldt (BA), Hawaii (MA), and Wisconsin (PhD).
