On 6 November 2025, Mariia Koskina will be participating in a workshop hosted by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, titled "Melting Mountains: Society and the Vertical Climate Frontier in the Mountainous Peripheries." She will present a paper on the history of harnessing glacial rivers in the Ile-Alatau for electricity generation and drinking water supply in post-war Almaty, Kazakhstan titled "From Glacier to Tap: Soviet Infrastructures, Big Almaty Lake, and the Politics of Water in the High Mountains."
On 10 Sepember 2025, Paul Warde presented a paper - Tamlaght 1840: work and gender in an Irish community - at the 7th Biennial Conference of the European Rural History Organisation which took place in Coimbra, Portugal.
Sophie FitzMaurice and Mariia Koskina delivered papers at the ESEH conference in Uppsala in August 2025. Sophie presented her research on 19th c. telegraph poles in the United States, which became nesting sites for termites that, in turn, attracted woodpeckers. Mariia presented a paper on 20th c. dam-building in Eastern Siberia, exploring how Soviet mega-dams impacted, and were themselves shaped by, various animal species beyond fish.
Varun Mallik presented a paper titled Is there a Season for Cyclones?: Affect and Science in the Bengal Delta at the conference of the European Society for Environmental History which was held at Uppsala University on 18-22 August 2025. The theme of this year's conference was Climate Histories. Varun's paper re-examined the histories of weather knowledge in colonial South Asia by problematizing the assumed coherence and linearity of the seasonality of storms and cyclones.
Varun Mallik presented a paper titled Storm-Science, Improvement Infrastructures, and Crisis in Colonial Bengal at the Annual Conference of the British Society for History of Science that was held at the University of Cambridge from 8-10 July 2025. His paper analysed a series of cheap Bengali battala prints on storms produced between the 1860s and 70s to think closely about the making of climatic crises in the colonial context.
On 26 June 2025, a one-day workshop was convened by Paul Warde and David Todd, and brought together members of the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge and Paris and associated scholars at Sciences Po. Participants discussed their research and future collaborations. This was the first in a series of workshops, the next one will be held in Cambridge in the Summer of 2026.
From 12 to 15 June 2025 June Mariia Koskina attended the ESCAS (European Society for Central Asian Studies) conference in Tashkent and Samarkand and presented a paper titled "In the Shadow of the Tian Shan Glacier: Balancing Opportunity and Vulnerability in Kazakh Glaciology" as part of the panel "Melting Mountains. Society and Environment of the Altai and Trans-Ili Alatau in the Anthropocene."
On 15 May 2025 Mariia Koskina joined members of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) for a meeting in connection with their Resource Frontiers project on water resources. They discussed a forthcoming edited volume tentatively titled Hydrologics: Rethinking Karl Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism" which aims to critically revisit Wittfogel's work and explore how water infrastructures have been conceptualized within diverse cosmopolitical frameworks.
On 12 April 2025, Sophie FitzMaurice presented a paper on "From Perishable Property to Industrial Preservation: Reinventing the Utility Pole in the Progressive-Era U.S.," as part of a panel on "Sylvan Technostates" at the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) annual conference in Pittsburgh.
On 27-28 March 2025, Sophie FitzMaurice hosted a workshop on "New Perspectives on the Animal Agriculture History " at the Harvard Center.
On 14 March 2025, Sophie FitzMaurice presented a paper on "Infrastructure, Pole Yards, and Hidden Labor within the Telegraph System, 1880s–1930s," as part of the panel "Geographies of Information Technology From Telegraphs to Computer Networks," at the Business History Conference in Atlanta.
On 11 March 2025 Giacomo Parrinello gave a talk to the Seminar "La fabrique de l'environnement" at University Paris 1 - Panthèon-Sorbonne entitled 'De l'eau pour la croissance : une histoire environnementale de la vallée du Po, 1770-2003'.
The group, based at the Paris Centre and hosted by Liane Hewitt, meet at the Centre for History, Sciences Po, Paris during the 2024-2025 academic year.
On 22 January 2025, Mariia Koskina explored the twists and turns of Soviet development in Siberia from the 1950s onwards.
On 17 January 2025 Paul Warde presented a paper to the Friends of the Argyll Papers which will examine the history of two neighbouring townships on the island of Tiree during the nineteenth century: Balinoe and Balemartine.
Mariia Koskina presented a paper at the MIASU conference on 12 December 2024. Her presentation - "Breathing Life into Siberian Rivers: Soviet Propaganda of Hydroelectric Construction" - explored the Krasnoyarsk Dam on the Yenisei river, constructed between 1956 and 1972.
Mariia Koskina presented at the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) annual convention in Boston on 23 November 2024 in a panel titled 'Environment, Technology, and Science in the Late USSR'. The title of her talk was 'Cry Me a River: The life of Almaty near Tian Shan glaciers in the late 20th century'.
Paul Warde's reconstruction of British coal consumption was used to illustrate the rise and fall of coal on the BBC News on 30th September 2024, the day that coal use in electricity finally ceased in Britain.
Sophie FitzMaurice presented her research in a panel on human-animal histories transformed by technologies at the WCEH (Fourth World Congress of Environmental History) in Oulu, Finland, 19-23 August 2024. Her paper was titled 'Beyond Barbed Wire: Fences as Sites of Multispecies Encounter'.
The 64th annual Allan Nevins Prize for the best-written doctoral dissertation was awarded to Project Research Fellow Sophie FitzMaurice for "The Material Telegraph: An Environmental History of the Technology that Wired America, c. 1848-1920."
On 30 October 2024 Project member Giacomo Parrinello spoke at the History and Economics Seminar at the Harvard Center on the environmental history of the Po Valley.
On 14 September 2024 Paul Warde spoke at An Talla, the Community Hall of Tiree, on the Economic and Demographic History of the island.
The Joint Center for History and Economics 1800 Histories project was the subject of an interview with Emma Rothschild on the Toynbee Prize Foundation website, with Glenda Sluga and Heidi Tworek.
This workshop, was held on 24 May 2024 in Paris, and was organised by Anatole Le Bras. It was funded by the Centre for History and Economics in Paris and hosted by the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po.
Extinction sounds important, certainly. But of what and for whom? What do we mean by it, why might that be important, and what are the politics of employing it as an idea? A workshop to discuss these ideas was held at the Cambridge Centre on 9-10 May 2024.
On 25 April 2024 Kew Gardens hosted a joint workshop involving researchers associated with the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and Economic History, Climate and Environment project, presenting work in progress on environmental history.
On 19 February 2024, Isobel Akerman gave a presentation to over 200 employees at Kew Gardens based on her PhD research. The talk was called 'Botanists and the global conservation movement, c1960 -1986'.
On 21 November 2023, Isobel Akerman gave a talk at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm based on her PhD research and entitled, "The seeds of biodiversity: The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the global conservation movement."
On 20 November 2023 Paul Warde spoke at a workshop on the concept of 'Environing' and 'Environing Technologies' at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
On 8 November 2023, Paul Warde presented a paper on "Tamlaght 1840: Work, gender and production in a proto-industrial community" at the Cambridge Core Seminar in Economic History.
(image ©Northern Ireland Museums)
Victor Seow was awarded the 2023 John Whitney Hall Book Prize for his book Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia.
Nature’s End: History and the Environment, by Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin, was recently cited by Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation 'To all people of goodwill on the climate crisis'.
Paul Warde gave a paper - 'Tamlaght 1840: anatomy of a proto-industrial world' - at the British Agricultural History Society conference on Friday 14th April 2023.
Paul Warde and Elly Robson each presented papers at the BAHS Winter Conference on 10 December 2022. Elly spoke as part of a roundtable on 'Environmental histories of early modern agriculture', and Paul gave a joint paper with Karen Sayer on 'Environmentalism and Agriculture in the 1960s'
Sunil Amrith presented a paper at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard on 28 November 2022. Sunil discussed who - and what other forms of life - can, and can't, move in response to escalating risk and uninhabitable conditions.
On 22 November 2022 Elly Robson presented a paper at the Department of History's research seminar at the University of Sheffield, titled 'Cows, ploughs, and sluices: the environmental politics of agricultural change in early modern England'.
11 November 2022
A one day workshop organised by Bina Agarwal and Paul Warde with the support of the Centre for History and Economics and the British Agricultural History Society took place at Magdalene College, Cambridge on.
7 November 2022
Isobel Akerman presented a paper for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Working Group as part of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Mark Hersey, Editor of Environmental History, visited the Cambridge Centre in Easter term 2022 to discuss current directions and publishing in environmental history with Centre students and researchers.