St Andrews Article Prize 2019

Award Winner

Congratulations!

A HONORARY MENTION goes to TIM SOENS for his article Resilient societies, vulnerable people: Coping with North Sea floods before 1800, published in Past and Present 241, November 2018. Tim’s work is particularly strong in its critical use and combination of different sources. It is a model for the kind of environmental histories much needed in a heating world. “Societal resilience [on a systemic level] and vulnerability of people are different things”, Tim writes. Vulnerability was created, people were put at risk by a peculiarpolitical and economic system that came with a loss of accountability for the land and for the people.

The ARTICLE PRIZE goes to Steven Hartman from Mälardalen University in Sweden and 5 co-authors – Astrid Ogilvie, Jon Haukur Ingimundarson, Andrew Dugmore, George Hambrecht, and Thomas McGovern – for Medieval Iceland, Greenland, and the New Human Condition: A case study in integrated environmental humanities published in Global and Planetary Change 156, September 2017. Their article analyses how societies cope with environmental hazards and changes. It takes medieval Iceland and Greenland as test cases, to compare different societal reactions to very similar environmental pressures. It is highly interdisciplinary work, bringing together scholars from the exact sciences, social sciences as well as humanities. As a result, the authors move beyond a climate deterministic approach, but still pay attention to the agency of climate and environmental factors.The article is highly relevant in using the past as a kind of laboratory to learn lessons for the present and future.

 

The Committee  members were Martin Schmid (chair), Institute of Social Ecology/Vienna, Austria, Yaron Baslev (Board representative), Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Maïka de Keyzer, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

---

 

Call for Submissions

The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) welcomes submissions for the 2019 St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History.

The prize rewards innovative and well-written article-length research in the field of European environmental history. Articles (or book chapters that are to be read as a stand-alone work) published in 2017 or 2018 on any subject in European environmental history, including Europe’s (post)colonial impact on the global environment, and in any European language, are eligible. We welcome applications from senior and junior scholars from all over the world, though some preference may be given to junior scholars.

The winner will receive a monetary award of EUR 500 as well as a travel grant (if needed) to attend the 10th ESEH Conference from August 21-25, 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia. In case you need financial travel assistance to come to Tallinn, please inform us in your submission.

Additionally, and for the first time, environmental historian and cartoonist Tomasz Samojilik has offered to sketch a ‘scientific cartoon’, a witty graphic summary of the winning article, given the authors’ consent.

In line with the diversity of interdisciplinary environmental history, we accept both single- and multi-authored manuscripts. In case of the latter, submitters must notify all co-authors of the submission. Nominations are limited to one article per main author. However, you can appear as a second or third author on other submissions. You can nominate articles by other authors but only if the authors agree to the nomination. Please note that the financial award is a fixed amount, independently of the number of authors.

Deadline for submissions is January, 15, 2019. Applicants are asked to submit their published articles by email as a PDF to martin.schmid@boku.ac.at. If the language of publication is not English, applicants should include a one-page summary in English.
The winner will be notified by the end of April 2019.

 

Members of the 2019 St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History committee:

 

• Martin Schmid (chair; Center for Environmental History, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria)

• Yaron J. Balslev (Department of Geography and Human Environment, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Israel)

• Maïka De Keyzer (Research group of medieval history, KU Leuven, Belgium)