The Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) at UC Santa Barbara is sponsoring a virtual conference on climate change that will be held from May 3-24, 2016. The advantages of holding a virtual conference are that it will reduce the conference’s carbon footprint and will encourage wider participation. Speakers will submit a video of themselves giving a 15-17 minute talk and will participate in Q&A sessions. Papers from all fields of the humanities and social sciences that innovatively deal with climate change are welcomed. Abstracts of 250 words and a brief biographical note should be submitted by March 1, 2016 to EHCfellow@gmail.com. For more information please see http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=12048.
Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity at Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center
The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at the Ohio State University is seeking applicants for a postdoctoral fellowship for advanced research on topics relevant to polar and alpine environments as well as global climate change. Applicants much contact a member of the Byrd Center prior to submission to discuss possible projects. The application deadline is March 1, 2016. Further information, application requirements and instructions, and a list of Byrd Center members can be found at www.bpcrc.osu.edu. For questions, please contact Ellen Mosley-Thompson.
Third Episode of the Climate History Podcast Released
in Podcast, Little Ice Age, Arctic
For the third episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews two leading archaeologists of the medieval and early modern Arctic: Dr. Thomas McGovern of the City University of New York, and Dr. George Hambrecht of the University of Maryland College Park. Since 1972, Professor McGovern has travelled the world for archaeological fieldwork. He has spent much of his time in the far north, especially in Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, and Shetland. He is one of the founders of the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO). More
CHN Winter Newsletter Published
Nicholas Cunigan, our newsletter editor, has just published the Winter 2016 issue of our quarterly Climate History Newsletter. The newsletter includes a letter from our administrators, a summary of climate history initiatives at major universities, a long list of recent publications, and highlights from our website content over the last four months.
Download the newsletter by clicking here.
CHN Awards Successes and Website Redesign
We are delighted to announce that the Climate History Network has received two substantial awards from competitive programs at Georgetown University. The first, a Research Infrastructure Award, will support a major expansion and redesign of our online presence. Co-administrator Dagomar Degroot has already used a small part of the award to give the Network a shorter domain name and an updated website. The second award comes from the Georgetown Environment Initiative Impact Program. It will fund annual "Climate History Workshops" dedicated to hands-on, interdisciplinary skills training. It will also support a major "Conflict and Climate Change" conference, likely in 2017. These events will be hosted by Georgetown University. This is a transformative moment for the Climate History Network. We are thrilled to have an institutional home at Georgetown.
Teaching Climate History in a Warming World
Note: these interviews constitute a climate history teaching guide that is now in our new teaching section.
This semester, I taught my first course devoted exclusively to the environmental history of climate change. The course was, as one of my senior auditors pointed out, unusually ambitious. Luckily, I had a group of brilliant, hard-working students who embraced its challenges. Their coursework included a fifteen-page essay that connected a change in past global or regional climates to an episode in human history. They had to find a topic and then use a primary source to make an argument about that topic. They needed to support their argument using a blend of scientific and humanistic scholarship. The results were impressive, and you can read some of the abstracts here. Read more
Second Episode of the Climate History Podcast: A Conversation with Sam White
In the second episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews the co-founder and co-administrator of the Climate History Network: Dr. Sam White of Ohio State University. Professor White is one of the most innovative and respected environmental historians of the "Little Ice Age," a period of climatic cooling that, according to some definitions, affected most of the world from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Professor White's first book, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. In it, Professor White uses interdisciplinary methods and sources to explore how climatic cooling and drying shaped the history of the Ottoman Empire. Read more