AAC2010 Programme schedule

Welcome from Roger Kain

Beveridge Hall

Plenary lecture I

The green light of a new world: natural abundance, scarcity and the historians
Donald Worster (Kansas)
Chair: Miles Taylor (IHR)

Beveridge Hall

Tea and coffee

Panel sessions I

Protecting the rural environment in Britain, c.1850–1950 (Beveridge Hall)
Chair: Michael Thompson 

• The Crown, the commoners and the public: the battle over the New Forest, Hampshire, 1851–1949
  Paul Readman (KCL)
• Preservation, community and the ‘renaissance of English rural life’, 1870–1950
  Jeremy Burchardt (Reading)
• Conserving the Chilterns, c.1920–50
  Roland Quinault (IHR)
  

Imagining and conserving modern America (Senate Room)
Chair: John Beckett (IHR)

• ‘My Winchester spoke to her’: crafting the Northern Rockies as a hunter’s paradise, c.1870–1910
  Karen Jones (Kent)
• Reshaping the Great Plains in the Russian image
  David Moon (Durham)
• East, west and American conservationism, 1830–1950
  David Schorr (Tel Aviv)
• Regenerating the prairies: Rescuing the ‘natural’ landscape in North America
  Janet Waymark (Birkbeck IHR)
  

Working the landscape (Room 103)
Chair: Stephanie Barczewski (Clemson)

• Petro-landscapes: work and environment in the age of oil
  Stefania Barca (Coimbra)
• Economic gains, environmental failures: mining in La Oroya, 1890s–2010
  Jose Carlos Orihuela (Columbia)
• Water conservancy development in the Ningxia irrigation district during the Qing dynasty
  Yue Yunxiao (Fudan)

• ‘Just a change in the weather is often the cause of death, or of good health’: the environment and health in early modern Italy
  Tessa Storey (RHUL)
• Insanitary nuisances in urban neighbourhoods: bottom-up, self-regulation of the micro-scale environment in northern English and Scottish towns, 1560–1700
  Leona Skelton (Durham)
• Objects and well-being in the early modern Italian home
  Marta Ajmar-Wollheim (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Names, places and colonial encounters (Deller Hall)
Chair:  Sujit Sivasundaram

• The water-world of Ketakamigwa and the ‘people of the dawn’
  Sharla Chittick (Stirling)
• Pure environment, pure people: eugenics, race betterment and the frontier in late 19th century America
  Kathy Cooke (Quinnipiac)
• The impact of American environmentalism in Southeast Asia, with special reference to Malaysia
  Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells (Cambridge)

Lunch reception in publishers’ fair

Plenary lecture II

Big history as prophylactic to premature interpretation: example - an Anthropocene exchange for the Columbian Exchange
Alfred Crosby (Texas)
Chair: Robert Lambert (Nottingham)

Beveridge Hall

Afternoon coffee

Panel sessions II

Waste and the environment: past, present and future (Deller Hall)
Chair: Mark Jenner (York)

• Waste in the age of scarcity
  John Clark (St Andrews)
• Waste and the political ecology of Victorian Britain
  Timothy Cooper (Exeter)
• The living dead: time, memory and nuclear waste
  John Scanlan (Manchester Metropolitan)
  

Knowing the environment (Senate Room)
Chair: James Galloway (IHR)

• American timber in an English house: William Blathwayt, Dyrham Park and changing representations of America in an early 18th-century country house
  Stephanie Barczewski (Clemson)
• Environment, identity and memory in Cromwell’s Ireland
  Sarah Covington (City University of New York)
• The Sociology of Plants in the Twentieth Century
  Adam Lawrence (California)

Environment in the long view (Beveridge Hall)
Chair: Miles Taylor (IHR)

• A colonial climate: explorations of scale and variability in the south west of Australia, 1829–2007
  Ruth Morgan (Western Australia)
• From Earthrise to Earth Day: the space programme and the eco-renaissance
  Robert Poole (Cumbria)
• From persecution to sustainable tourism icon: an environmental history of the osprey in Britain, 1850-2010
  Robert Lambert (Nottingham)

The ecology of empire: mixing and moving nature’s objects (Wolfson/Pollard room)
Chair: Felix Driver (RHUL)

• Manioc in Mozambique? The ecological imperialism of governing an Atlantic empire
  Neil Safier (British Columbia)
• Reading a herbarium as a mestizo object: imperial mixtures in books of nature
  James Delbourgo (Rutgers)
• Whose botanical garden? Buddhist and British attitudes to nature in Ceylon
  Sujit Sivasundaram (LSE)

• The making of ‘Chiantishire’: the history of the Chianti region in the 20th century
  Leo Goretti (Reading)
• Cockles, conservation and the contested coast of Wales
  Kaori O’Connor (UCL)
  

• Natural History, local history, and the VCH: the origins of an intellectual tradition
  John Beckett (Victoria County History, University of London)
• Natural history in the early VCH
  Charles Watkins (University of Nottingham)
• Motor-Bicycling around England: Architecture and Archaeology in the early VCH
  Chris Lewis and Paul Stamper (English Heritage)

Plenary lecture III

Shadows of things to come: preservation and progress in the 19th century
Harriet Ritvo (MIT)
Chair: Ludmilla Jordanova (KCL)

Beveridge Hall

Policy forum (attendance is free and open to members of the public)

Can policy makers today learn from histories of the environment?

Chair: Paul Warde (UEA)
Deborah Lamb, Policy Director, English Heritage
Georgina Endfield, Honorary Secretary for Research, Royal Geographical Society
Alastair Fitter, CBE, ecologist and Fellow of the Royal Society
Jim Bamberg, author of the official history of BP
Ian Christie, Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey, Green Alliance and co-author of Church and Earth (2009)
Mark Levene, founder, Rescue! History and co-editor, History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure (2010)

Evening reception, Tower Bridge

Plenary lecture IV

Plant transfers, imperialism and biodiversity: a view from Africa
William Beinart (Oxford)
Chair: Vivian Bickford-Smith (IHR)

Beveridge Hall

Morning coffee

Panel sessions III

Campaigning for the environment in Britain and the United States, 19th and 20th centuries (Beveridge Hall)
Chair: Roland Quinault (IHR)

• Campaigning for the environment in Britain and the US in the 19th century
  Charles-François Mathis (Paris) 
• Environmental NGOs and environmental campaigning in Britain since 1945
  Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton, James McKay & Jean-François Mouhot (Birmingham)
• Progressivism and the environment
  John Brown & Joan Broome (Georgia Southern)

Forest history: transatlantic connections (Senate Room)
Chair: Paul Warde (UEA)

• Conquering the Highlands: the arrival of ‘Canadian style’ large forestry in the Scottish Highlands, 1920–60
  Jan Oosthoek (Newcastle)
• British Columbia conifer seeds, 1912–40
  David Brownstein (British Columbia)

Resilient communities: local level response to disasters on three continents, 1300–1900 (Deller Hall)
Chair: Sarah Palmer (Greenwich Maritime Institute)

• Creating civil community: municipal governance and local responses to flood in the 19th-century Philippines
  Greg Bankoff (Hull)
• Pestilence, flood and plague: climate deterioration and its effects on the Cistercian Abbey at Lewaux, Lower Hull Valley, in the first half of the 14th century
  Mary Carrick (Hull)
• Volcanic hazard in a slave society: the 1812 eruption of Mount Soufriere in St Vincent
  Simon Smith (Hull)

Measuring environmental impact (Room 103)
Chair: Matthew Bristow (VCH)

• Disappearing worlds: an archival study of environmental change in the glaciers of the Mer de Glace using historical cartography and photographic surveys
  John Hessler (Library of Congress)
• Climate, fascism and ibex: a case study in historical animal population trends
  Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (Trento)
• Dead polecats: a Yorkshire perspective
  Chris Webb (York) 

Migrants in the landscape: ethnic groups in new environments (Wolfson/Pollard room)
Chair: David Feldman (Birkbeck)

• From Garlic Hill to Goatsville: Italians in the American landscape
  Marco Armiero (Universitat Autonoma Barcelona)
• Migration and environmental crisis in frontier Nevada
  Louis Warren (University California Davis)
• Environment degradation as a cause of migration
  Angus Wright (California State University, Sacramento)

Conflict and space (Germany room)
Chair:  Helen Valier (Houston)

• Rebuilding a nation: disability and rurality after the First World War
  Wendy Gagen (Exeter)
• Volatile spaces and the infrastructure of pain: patients and practitioners in military medicine, 1914–18
  Ann Carden-Coyne (Manchester)
• Disabled ex-servicemen and their home environment in the Second World War
  Julie Anderson (Kent)

Lunch reception

Panel sessions IV

Popular protest and moral ecology in Britain (Wolfson/Pollard room)
Chair: Matthew Cragoe (Sussex)

• Performing tasks in the Forest of Dean: the Warren James riots of 1831
  Iain Robertson (Gloucestershire)
• Landscapes in the making: enclosure and enclosure riots in early modern Yorkshire and Northamptonshire
  Briony McDonagh (Nottingham)
• Changing landscapes in northern England: Popular protest in urban-rural hinterlands, 1812–34
  Katrina Navickas (Hertfordshire)

Beyond the battlefield: army bases, militarisation and environmental change and continuity in Britain, France and the US (Room 103)
Chair: William Philpott (KCL)

• From Epynt to SENTA: the environmental history of Sennybridge Training Area, Wales, 1939–2009
  Tim Cole (Bristol)
• From battlefield to military base: the environmental history of Suippes Camp, France, 1914–2009
  Chris Pearson (Bristol)
• From toxic liabilities to ecological assets: the environmental history of Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats, Colorado
  Peter Coates (Bristol)

Mobilising for the environment (Deller Hall)
Chair: Paul Readman (KCL)

• Restoring the Garden of Eden in revolutionary England: the Diggers' attitude towards the environment
  Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths)
• The short 20th century of the environment, 1908-85: the environmental question and the ecological issue in Italy
  Marzia Maccaferri & Federico Paolini (Istoreco/Siena)
• Freak power and environmental politics
  Jim Morrow (Nottingham Trent)

Arranging the environment: cultures of natural history, 1750–1900 (Senate Room)
Chair: Emma Spary (UCL)

• Connoisseurship, commerce and nature, c.1760–93
  Sarah Easterby-Smith (Warwick)
• Jutting teeth and gaping mouths: representations of nature, 1760–1800
  Kate Smith (Warwick)
• ‘Flowers that never fade’: artificial flowers in science, art and fancywork of the 19th century
  Ellery Foutch (Pennsylvania)

Environments of empire in India and Africa (Beveridge Hall)
Chair: Vinita Damodaran (Sussex)

• Electrifying Africa: environmental consequences of technological innovation
  Kate Showers (Sussex) 
• Improvements for progress: hydraulic transformations in colonial south Asia
  Rohan D’Souza (JNU, Delhi)
  
• Black wattle, eucalyptus, pine: colonial tree planting and its legacies in the South Pare Mountains, Tanzania
  Pauline von Hellerman (York)

Artistic environments: disability and image making (postgraduate session) (Germany room)

• Introduction and commentary
  Catherine Kudlick (University of California, Davis)
• Painting by mouth: art, disability and Victorian fascination
  Ann Roberts (Exeter)
• 'The image of objectivity': albinism, photographic environments and British eugenics research, 1905–14
  Tom White (Manchester)

Plenary lecture V

Mosquito empires
John McNeill (Georgetown)
Chair: Philip Murphy (Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

Beveridge Hall

Afternoon tea

Panel sessions V

Flooding as an agent of change in medieval and early modern Europe (Germany room)
Chair: James Galloway (IHR)

• Reconstruction, assessment and impact of high tides, storms and storm surges in the southern North Sea area, 1390–1690
  Adriaan de Kraker (Free University of Amsterdam)
• A managed retreat? Storm surges, landscape change and economic strategies in coastal Flanders, c.1300–c.1600AD)
  Tim Soens (Antwerp)
• Managing the risk of floods in the Upper Rhine Valley and Tuscany in the Renaissance, c.1270–1560
  Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
• Floods of the Upper Danube river and its tributaries and their impact on urban economies, c.1350–1600
  Christian Rohr (Salzburg)

Collaboration and communication between environmental history scholars (Beveridge Hall)
Chair: Jan Oosthoek (Newcastle)

• Of networks, archives and collaboration across the pond
  Alan MacEachern (Western Ontario)
• The European Society for Environmental History and networks
  David Moon (Durham)
• The facilitation of networks of environmental historians
  Harriet Ritvo (MIT)

Governance and the environment (Wolfson/Pollard room)
Chair: Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck)

• The Aqua Augusta and imperial control of water resources in the Bay of Naples in antiquity
  Duncan Keenan-Jones (Macquarie)
• Governance, stakeholders and the Thames environment, 1947–64
  Vanessa Taylor & Sarah Palmer (Greenwich)
• The environmental and land use history of an area damaged by the salt-based industries in Cheshire
  Kinan Ibrahim (Manchester)

The nature of the public good: contesting resources in Britain, 1600–1800 (Deller Hall)
Chair: Christopher Smout (St Andrews)

• Pollution or national asset: coal, smoke and the London economy, 1660–1700
  William Cavert (Northwestern)
• Commons or common wealth? Drainage, enclosures and the debate over the public good in the early 17th century
  Julie Bowring (Yale)
• Peak coal 1789: the politics of ecological limits
  Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (Chicago)

City climates and small-scale histories (Senate Room)
Chair: Derek Keene (IHR)

• Unwritten histories of urban weather
  Vladimir Jankovic & Michael Hebbert (Manchester)
• Fixing the urban sky
  James Rodger Fleming (Colby College)
• Gardens and the construction of micro-climate narratives
  Georgina Endfield (Nottingham)

Sustainability and resources in the early modern Atlantic world (Room 103)
Chair: Peter Lake

• Sustaining environmental control: the design and implementation of early modern state forestry in Spain, 1748–54
  John Wing (City University of New York)
• ‘Gross mistakes and carelessness for the future’: Pehr Kalm’s observations of the use of natural resources in the Nordic countries, England and North America
  Laura Hollsten (Turku)
• Soil and society in Britain, c.1600–1770
  Paul Warde (UEA)

Evening reception and conference close