Colloquium: Environmental History

Undergraduate / Graduate

This graduate colloquium provides an advanced introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history, and is particularly designed for PhD students seeking training in the field's increasingly diverse approaches. Alongside classic texts, we will discuss recent examples of methodologically innovative research. Some of these works contribute to emerging subfields like animal history, evolutionary history, climate history, ocean history, and Anthropocene history; others find novel uses for more established historical approaches, like commodity history, labor history, and urban history. Some rely on traditional archival sources, while others draw on oral history, archaeological and linguistic evidence, and insights borrowed from the natural sciences. Through close reading, we will examine how environmental historians have addressed new analytical and aesthetic challenges: negotiating relationships with science and scientists, incorporating non-human agency, and writing history at the unfamiliar scales of deep time, the pathogen, and the planetary. A happy side effect is that we will be reading some of the most vivid and eloquent historical work being penned today. Many (though far from all) environmental historians aim to reach broader audiences by experimenting with style and narrative. While encountering the conceptual and empirical range of environmental history as a discipline, we will also pay attention to the craft of writing history.