The Tallinn Prize Committee had a wonderful field of candidates for this prize. Congratulations to the winners, the finalists and all the other submissions. Together, you exemplified the breadth and richness of environmental history in and beyond Europe today.
Prize Winners
Taylor Zajicek, Princeton University (United States) – Black Sea, Cold War: An Environmental History of the Black Sea Region, 1930-2005
This is an environmental-political history of the Black Sea during the Cold War that develops a transhistorical approach to provide a new lens on the region’s history. As Zajicek writes the goal is to go against ‘universalist narratives of globalisation/ecological decline’ and offers a new way of viewing this history. “I felt this was a clear demonstration of what environmental history ‘can do for the world’ ” one of the reviewer’s wrote. The author demonstrates that the environmental features and changing conditions of the Black Sea shaped conflict and collaboration across the region, and that the Cold War geopolitical order left a lasting environmental imprint on the Black Sea region. It was based on an impressive amount of material from numerous archives in different languages, which shows a mammoth research effort.
Etienne Dufour, University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) – The End of Recycling? Metabolic Rift and Biogeochemical Policies in the Parisian Region during the XXth Century
This dissertation traces the transformation of human organic waste management and nutrient recycling practices in the Paris region from the early twentieth century through the 1980s. It is a nuanced exploration of the “non-linear, contingent nature of socio-technical change” one reviewer wrote, that shows the complex political, social, and environmental factors that led to the marginalization of recycling. The author’s commitment to uncovering paths not taken is especially valuable in an era where ecological management of nutrients is a pressing global challenge. From the perspective of the history of waste, the thesis covers a neglected period of time and renews our understanding of the shift away from recycling at the turn of the twentieth century. Dufour’s research impresses with its rigorous use of a wide range of archival sources and published materials.
The committee also requests that the other finalists receive recognition on the ESEH website:
- Jin-Woo Choi, Princeton University (United States) – The Cold Standard: The Great Winter of 1709 in European Context
- Julia Engelschalt, Bielefeld University (Germany) -The Great Obsession: Tropicality in U.S.-American Colonial Medicine and Domestic Public Health, 1898–1924
- Siegfried Evens, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) – Streams, Steams, and Steels: A Transnational History of Risk Regulation in Nuclear Power Plants (1850-1985)
- Iryna Skubii, Queen’s University (Canada) – Survival Under Extremes: Human, Environmental, and Material Relationships Amidst the Soviet Famines in Ukraine
- Andrei Vinogradov, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany) – In Dire Straits: Struggle with Industrial Water Pollution and Emergence of Russia’s Environmental Policy (1873–1931)
The 2025 Tallinn Dissertation Prize Committee
Robert Gioielli, chair (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden)
Marina Luskutova (Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia)
Samira P. Moretto (Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul, Brazil)