Environmental History is a well-established field of historical inquiry, grounded in its own scholarly traditions, methodologies, and historiographical frameworks. Its perspectives are legion: environmental history enables the analysis of the mutual relationship between human and non-human actors, and of their agencies in the constitution and development of different environments.
The close dialogue to neighboring disciplines and fields has always been characteristic for environmental history. Fields like animal studies and anthropology, political ecology and ecocriticism, or science and technology studies are entangled with environmental history. Today, the field encompasses an ever-wider range of topics, as it engages with postcolonial studies, planetary history, indigenous epistemologies, multispecies ethnography, gender history, material culture, and memory studies. This widening of scope has not only challenged conventional narratives but also introduced new questions, methodologies, and forms of historical storytelling.
The EUI Environmental History Working Group provides a platform for Ph.D. researchers to explore, discuss, and reflect on both foundational and emerging trends in environmental history. Our primary goal is to connect early-career scholars from the EUI and beyond, working on environmentally focused topics, in a hybrid format (at EUI and via zoom), fostering dialogue through reading groups, workshops, and collaborative discussions. By engaging critically with current scholarship, we aim to reconsider the role of environmental history within broader historical and interdisciplinary debates.