Environmental History

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

Meeting Location: History Faculty, Gerry Martin Room, unless otherwise stated

Week 1 (17 October) 10:00-11:30 - Common Ground Café, 37-38 Little Clarendon Street
Environmental History Social

Meet other environmental historians over coffee, tea, and bites to eat at Common Ground Café. All EHWG members (regardless of discipline) are welcome – especially those new to Oxford and our working group! We will have a section of the café booked from 10:00am to 11:30am, so look for the EHWG reserved tables. Please let us know if you plan to come so we can get a feel for how many people will join.

Week 3 (31 October)
Niklas Groschinski - Writing the Environmental History of an Early Modern City – Questions, Sources, Problems

This presentation seeks to initiate a discussion about early modern environmental history, its opportunities, strengths, and limits. As a starting point, I will present my own project, which deals with the city of Nuremberg in the 15th and 16th century. Nuremberg defined itself by its trade and artistry––two things that can be understood as a conscious distancing from local ‘nature.’ Hence, traditional accounts of the city have focused on these layers of the city’s identity. It is my attempt to reflect on how the natural surroundings have shaped the city and how the city ruled over its waters, woods, meadows, and stone quarries. I will share what sources I have found in the Nuremberg archives, how they might be used to reveal something about these issues; and also, which questions will be hard to answer, given the lack of documentation. I will also give a brief overview of the field of early modern environmental history, segueing into an open discussion about what other environmental historians think early modernists should or should not be doing for them. Lastly, I would like to discuss the possible application of environmental history concepts, such as non-human agency or new materialism, to a period that is harder to grasp than the past two centuries, which have been the focus of more theoretical studies.

Week 5 (14 November)
David Lepidi - Plant Life from the Pre-Socratics to Theophrastus

Debates on the living capacities of plants in ancient Greek philosophy date as far back as the 5th century BCE, when the Pre-Socratic philosophers first began theorizing about the place of plants in the universe and their interconnectedness with the natural world. Ever since, philosophers have responded to the doctrines of the Pre-Socratics and elaborated new theories on plant physiology and life. Debates hinged on the question of the soul, and whether plants were endowed with the same life processes of animals and human beings. Following a chronological line, this presentation will explore the evolution of the conception of plant life in ancient Greek philosophy.

Week 7 (28 November)
Ruka Hussain - Science, Ecology and Romanticism in George Catlin’s Travelling "Indian Gallery"

Over the course of five visits to the American West in the 1830s, George Catlin (b.1796) created a collection of Native American portraits and artifacts, which he toured using a range of performance strategies such as lectures and audience participation. While most scholarship focuses either on figurations of the ‘vanishing Indian’ in his paintings or the museological aspects of his gallery, my paper characterises Catlin’s work as occupying a point of juncture between European and American romanticism, and between literary/artistic Romantic movements and burgeoning scientific disciplines. I apply to visual culture the suggestion of Bruce Greenfield, who argues that American romantic literature, particularly Thoreau, provided imaginative ‘first contacts’ through which readers could ‘know’ the land. Catlin’s gallery, however, provided frontier simulations that were multi-sensorial, engaging a more embodied form of knowledge. I also develop the work of Richard Sha, who argues that Romanticism was linked with science via the role of the imagination. By considering the spatial-temporal experiences of particular forms of visual culture, I chart the ways in which Catlin’s gallery engaged (historical) imagination and sewed lines between ecology, anthropology, and history.