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The 2025 Turku Book Award goes to Netta Cohen (University of Oxford) for her monograph New Under the Sun: Early Zionist Encounters with the Climate in Palestine (University of California Pres, 2024).
Congratulations to Netta Cohen on an outstanding work!
New Under the Sun makes a nuanced and clear intervention solidly rooted in environmental history. Engaging also with the history of science, the book investigates ideas of race, colonization, and climate in relation to their real-world consequences on the ground. It builds on past environmental histories of settler colonies and of the Middle East, while avoiding simplistic binaries and drawing original conclusions about the unique context of Palestine.
What motivates us to elect this work as a winner for the Turku Book Prize is its thorough environmentalization of European settler colonialism, European politics, and other relevant aspects of European history – all applied to a region beyond Europe. More generally, the book exemplifies how the imagination of climate shapes colonial projects that, when realized, often do not match the underlying imagination. By comparison and juxtaposition, Cohen argues against the exceptionalism of Zionism among colonial projects, instead revealing its commonalities with similar projects in warmer climates.
Dealing with a historical topic that intersects with an ongoing humanitarian disaster, the end of which is still unclear, Cohen’s work is timely and will help environmental historians approach this disaster, not only as humanities scholars but also as environmental scholars. At the same time, it offers an environmental lens for the interested public and researchers in other fields, adding an important dimension for making sense of what has happened and what is yet to unfold. As such, New Under the Sun is sure to be and remain influential in and beyond Europe, as well as in and beyond the field of environmental history.
The shortlisted titles:
Gabriela Jarzębowska (University of Warsaw, Poland): Species Cleansing: The Cultural Practice of Rat Control, by Gabriela Jarzebowska (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2024)
Joana Gaspar de Freitas (University of Lisbon): A Global Environmental History of Coastal Dunes (Routledge, 2025)
Ellen Arnold (Ohio State University): Medieval Riverscapes: Environmental Meaning and Memory in Northwest Europe, ca. 300–1100 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Members of the 2025 Turku Prize Committee are:
Jonatan Palmblad (chair), Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany
Etienne Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany
Abigail Agresta, Georgetown University, United States
Ulrike Plath, Tallinn University, Estonia
Melanie Arndt, University of Freiburg, Germany
