The Deadly Dreams Network, the Hazardous Travels DFG Emmy Noether Research Group, and the Center for the History of Global Development Shanghai invite proposals for a workshop entitled “Hazardous Time-Scapes: How to Make Sense of Toxic Landscapes from Multiple Timed, Spaced, and Embodied Perspectives?” to be held at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society on December 1-2, 2017.

Full details are available in the call for papers.

The deadline for submissions is on September 15, 2017.

The Association for Asian Studies invites applications to participate in the second of three workshops in its series “Emerging Fields in the Study of Asia” supported by the Luce Foundation. The second workshop, “Asia and the Anthropocene,” will take place August 23-27, 2018 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Full details are available in the call for papers.

The deadline for applications is October 2, 2017.

 https://lu.mynetworkglobal.com/se/what:job/jobID:158428/type:job/where:4/apply:1

[The English version can be reached by clicking on the flag in the top right hand corner.]

The Human Ecology Division applies an anthropological and inter-disciplinary definition of its research field. Research and education at the division deals with human-environmental relations in different cultural contexts. The ambition is to integrate perspectives from the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities in understanding sustainability issues at local and global scales. Particularly important is to complement and elaborate definitions of environmental problems deriving from natural and engineering sciences by emphasizing aspects such as culture, power, and global distribution. Research at the division has, for instance, focused on ecologically unequal exchange, global environmental load displacement, climate justice, the political ecology of indigenous populations, traditional resource management, and ethnobiology.

The post comprises teaching and research in Human Ecology. 20 per cent of the post is made up of government-funded research and 80 per cent is teaching, including administrative duties. The proportion of research can be expanded through external research funding. In addition to conducting high-quality research and education in human ecology, the successful candidate is expected to be able to take responsibility for the development and administration of study programs and courses in the field of Human Ecology. In addition teaching and administrative tasks may also take place in courses/programs in the interface between Human ecology and Human geography Teaching may take place in both Swedish and English. 

The latest ICEHO Bulletin is out with news from the last ESEH meeting in Zagreb: check it out!

For the fourth year in a row, the new ESEH Board has decided to issue a Call for Proposals for Funding for small workshops and conferences to increase support for environmental history activities in Europe. The Board intends to award 500€ to up to two proposals. Environmental history workshops and conferences of no more than 100 participants which will be held in Europe during 2017 and are organized by an ESEH member are eligible.

A proposal of up to 2 pages should include (1) the name, date, location and theme of the conference/workshop, (2) an overview of the program, (3) a projected number and type of attendees, (4) an overview of the total budget, other financial sources, and a description of how the 500€ would benefit the activity, and (5) a short biographical paragraph about the organiser (who must be an ESEH member).

The deadline is August 15, 2017. Submit proposals to secretary@eseh.org.

The fourth ESEH/RCC Turku Book Award was conferred at the 9th biennial ESEH Conference, 28 June – 2 July 2017 to William M. Cavert, for his book  The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

The selection committee consisted of Verena Winiwarter (Chair; Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Jane Carruthers (University of South Africa), Arielle Helmick (RCC), Jan-Heinrich Meyer (University of Copenhagen), and Ellen Arnold (Ohio Wesleyan University)

2017 Finalists were:

• Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Giacomo Parrinello, Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy, Berghahn Books, 2015.
• Peter Thorsheim, Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

To read the full laudation from the award speech by Verena Winiwarter, including contributions from Arielle Helmick and Jane Carruthers based upon the discussions of the Turku Prize committee, click here.

The 2017 St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History was awarded to Maïka De Keyzer for her article All we are is dust in the wind: The social causes of a “subculture of coping” in the late medieval coversand belt, published in the Journal for the History of Environment and Society, vol. 1, in 2016.

De Keyzer’s article makes a substantial contribution to the environmental history of pre-modern Europe through a sophisticated blend of social, economic and ecological history, based on an impressively diverse dataset. Her rigorously argued analyses addresses the culture of coping with potentially disastrous sand drifts in the Campine region, but will be insightful for any historian interested in ‘natural’ hazards and disasters, their associated cultures of resilience and related social structures irrespective of chronological era or region. The devised method of critically combining traditional archival sources with archaeological findings and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) studies has a potential to change the way we understand the history of the conversand belt region and the historical coping mechanisms concerning the hazard of shifting sands.

The prize committee has also decided to give two honorary mentions to Johanna Conterio for a fascinating insight into the construction of subtropical landscapes of health in Stalinist Russia in her article Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1928-1936 (in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16:1, 2015), and to Chris Pearson for Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(2), 2016), a compelling and theoretically laden case study of the introduction of police dogs into the French police force, that reaches out to animal history with the help sociology and psychology.

The 2017 St Andrews Article Prize Committee consisted of Kati Lindström (chair; University of Tartu/ KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Peter Coates (University of Bristol) and Péter Szabó (Czech Academy of Sciences).

The Hungarian Historical Review invites submissions for its third issue in 2018, the theme of which will be “An environmental history of wars in Central Europe”.

Full details are available in the call for papers.
Deadline for submissions of abstracts is 30 September 2017.

In celebration of the ESEH conference in Zagreb, from 28 June to 2 July 2017, White Horse Press is excited to present the first Special Virtual Edition of Environment and History. The collection is available to download at absolutely no cost in both PDF format (3.8 MB, suitable for laptops and ipads) and epub format (1.9 MB, readable using ibooks and other mobile apps).

If you don’t want to download the whole issue, there is a summary PDF (a much smaller file, containing the introductory essays and links to the papers on the IngentaConnect platform – subscription required).

The Special Virtual Edition assembles 15 papers from the Environment and History archives (1995–2017) that reflect on the conference’s theme of ‘Natures in between’, with an introduction by E&H editor Karen Jones and commentaries by the Chair of the conference programme committee, Marco Armiero, and ESEH President Dolly Jørgensen. This substantial free sampler will introduce new readers to the extraordinary range of scholarship published by Environment and History and remind those already familiar with the journal of our position at the forefront of this dynamic and ever-expanding field.
View Special Virtual Edition Contents List

The Berlin-Brandenburg Colloquium on Environmental History – organised by Astrid M. Kirchhof and Jan-Henrik Meyer since 2012 – provides a forum for local and international researchers to meet in an informal setting and discuss up-to-date research in environmental history. The summer semester schedule is now available.