Environmental History

Time: Thursdays 12:30pm to 2:00pm, unless otherwise stated

Meeting Location: Rees Davies Room, Faculty of History, unless otherwise stated

Week 2 (30 January)
Alice Dobinson - Exploring the Evolutionary History of Domestic Ferrets

The domestic ferret (Mustela putorius furo) offers an unconventional but fascinating and unique opportunity to explore the complexities and dynamism of human-animal relationships. Despite being widely used today as working animals, pets, and subjects in biomedical research, the history of ferrets is widely uncertain, complicated by a scarcity of archaeological evidence and ambiguities within the historic record. What is clear, however, is that ferrets are a particularly striking case of how narratives about where and when an animal was domesticated can be built upon ambiguous and limited evidence. I will reinvestigate these narratives through an interdisciplinary approach which weaves together historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genomic evidence. By harnessing the opportunity to investigate one of few domestication events occurring in the historic period, I hope to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research and uncover new insights into the domestication of ferrets – and domestication process more generally.

Week 3 (6 February)
EHWG x HSMTE Workshop Roundtable: History of Science and Environmental History at Oxford, Student Perspectives (Organised in association with the HSMTE Workshop)

Organized in conjunction with the History of Science, Medicine, Technology, and Environment (HSMTE) Workshop, this roundtable will explore the current state of the histories of science and environment at Oxford and identify areas of student interest between the two subdisciplines. Environmental history and the history of science share an ever-growing body of scholarship. Over the last few years, the intersection between the two fields has received attention for the potential to investigate sites of knowledge-making and questions of sustainability that inform present action (Hersey & Vetter, 2019). However, the promise found in the ecotone between these subfields remains at risk of methodological and disciplinary tensions. The latter is especially noticeable at Oxford. Environmental history does not hold a place as an established area of study in the history faculty, such as the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, which itself acts as one of the various loci for scholars interested in environmental questions.

As environmental history continues to coalesce at Oxford, what compelling questions, methods, and issues emerge at the overlap of the history of science and environment? Looking forward, how might we encourage the flourishing of scholarly terrain “neither here nor there” between the history of science and environmental history?

Week 4 (13 February) - The Common Room, Faculty of History
Applying for History of Science, Medicine, Technology, & Environment: An Early Career Panel
(Organized in association with the HSMTE Workshop)

How can early career historians working between the humanities and sciences successfully market themselves? Hear from current ECRs, departmental lecturers, and JRFs working in the history of science, medicine, technology, and environment about their experience after the doctorate and get practical tips for grant, CV, and abstract writing.

Speakers: Dr Hohee Cho (Departmental Lecturer and Research Assistant at Pandemic Sciences Institute, Oxford); Dr Alex Aylward (Departmental Lecturer, Oxford); Dr John Lidwell-Durnin (Lecturer at University of Exeter and Leverhulme Research Fellow, Oxford); Dr Netta Cohen (Junior Research Fellow, Christ Church); and Dr Tom Kelsey (Humanities and Public Policy Officer, Oxford Humanities Division).

Week 5 (20 February)
Andrew McNey - Back Where We Began: Cyclical conceptions of human-environment relationships

In 2018 a dendroecological study of the European Alps and Russian Altai produced convincing data on the existence of a “Late Antique Little Ice Age”. A series of unusually large eruptions in the early 530s resulted in the most significant cooling of the earth’s climate for the last 2 millennium. Encouraged by advances in palaeoclimatology, historians have returned to the study of the 6th century as an area ripe for investigation into human-climate relationships. New archaeobotanical studies of the villages and towns of the Negev identify a decline in agricultural production and economic prosperity beginning in the middle 6th century. The studies argue that we should attribute this decline to the impacts of climate change upon communities farming in challenging environments. In conjunction to this research, archaeologists have embraced the concept of resilience as a useful tool to study not only the historical agency of the natural world, but also anthropogenic responses to the physical environment. Using a resilience framework, a cyclical narrative is constructed wherein societies rebuild systems from their constituent parts following upheaval. In this talk I will test a cyclical approach to the study of the towns and villages of the Negev in the late 6th century. I will discuss community resilience, psychological notions of the cycle of change, and conceptions of circular economies. Does a cyclical approach offer a more accurate reconstruction of human-environment relationships in the past?

Week 7 (6 March)
Emma Nabi-Bourgois - Readers, workers, beetles: the impact of Karel Klostermann’s literary canonization of the forest of Šumava/Böhmerwald on local landscape and communities in the late 19th and early 20th century

The writings of Czech-German author Karel Klostermann (1848-1923) continue to shape Czech debates surrounding the administration the Bohemian Forest (Czech: Šumava, German: Böhmerwald) national park today. We are yet to understand how his work influenced contemporary actors, human and otherwise. This paper considers one of his Czech-language works, Ze světa lesních samot (1894), a more-than-human story of social change and modernisation taking place in the forest of Šumava just before the bark beetle outbreak of the 1870s irreversibly altered the woodlands. By contextualising Klostermann’s work and using a cultural- and social-historical approach, this paper assesses the novel’s direct and indirect impact on its two primary actors: the local population and the local landscape.