The group is currently organised by Mariia Koskina and Paul Warde and meets weekly at the Cambridge Centre.
2025-2026
18 March 2026
Giacomo Bonan and Katia Occhi (eds.), Environment and Infrastructure Challenges, Knowledge and Innovation from the Early Modern Period to the Present (De Gruyter Brill, 2023)
11 March 2026
Paul S. Sutter, "Nature's Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal." Isis, 2007, 98:724–754.
4 March 2026
Ellie Robson Dezateux. "Assembling Environmental Politics: An Introduction." In: Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge University Press; 2026:6-30.
and
Christopher Taylor, The Cambridgeshire Landscape (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973)
25 February 2026
Rob Nixon, Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (Harvard University Press, 2011)
18 February 2026
Simeon Koole and Ben Mechen, "Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London's Docks, 1860–1928." Past & Present, September 26, 2025.
11 February 2026
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales," Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 3, Fall 2012, pp. 505-524.
4 February 2026
Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham University Press, 2019)
28 January 2026
Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years (Penguin Books, 2024)
3 December 2025
Gregory Rosenthal, "Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–70," Environmental History 17 (October 2012): 744–782.
and
Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the opening of the Pacific world : a global ecological history (Cambridge University Press, 2013.)
26 November 2025
Alan Mikhail, 'Ottoman Iceland: A Climate History', Environmental History 20:2 (2015), 262-84
and
Katrin Kleemann, A Mist Connection (De Gruyter, 2023)
19 November 2025
Peter Brewitt, Same River Twice: The Politics of Dam Removal and River Restoration (Oregon State University Press, 2019)
12 November 2025
Per Högselius, "Atomic Shocks of the Old: Putting Water at the Center of Nuclear Energy History" in Technology and Culture, 63, no. 1 (2022): 1–30.
5 November 2025
Hiroki Shin, "Fukushima before Nuclear Power: Developmentalism, Substates, and the Landscape of Energy Extraction in Japan," in Environmental History (Volume 30, Number 1, January 2025)
29 October 2025
María de los Ángeles Picone, Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina (University of North Carolina Press, 2025)
22 October 2025
Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette, eds., How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (University of New Mexico Press, 2019)
2024-2025
10 June 2025
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
3 June 2025
Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024)
27 May 2025
Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica:
An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024)
20 May 2025
Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale Univerity Press, 2023)
13 May 2025
Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse, Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT Press, 2023)
6 May 2025
Selected works of
Giacomo Parrinello.
29 April 2025
Andrea Ballestero, A Future history of water (Due University Press, 2019)
18 March 2025
José Iriarte, The Archaeology of Amazonia: A Human History (Bloomsbury, 2024).
11 March 2025
Oliver Rackham, Woodlands (Harper Collins, 2010)
4 March 2025
Alfred Thomas Grove and Oliver Rackham, The nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (Yale University Press, 2001)
25 February 2025
Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018)
11 February 2025
Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
4 February 2025
Edmund Russell, Greyhound Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
28 January 2025
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2018)
21 January 2025
Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Thames & Hudson, 2015)
3 December 2024
Robert Michael Morrissey, 'The Power of the Ecotone: Bison, Slavery, and the Rise and Fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia', The Journal of American History Vol. 102, No. 3 (December 2015), pp. 667-692.
26 November 2024
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2023)
19 November 2024
Michael Bintley and Kate Franklin, Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2023)
12 November 2024
Angus J L Winchester, Common Land in Britain A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Boydell and Brewer, 2022)
5 November 2024
Ruth Rogaski, Knowing Manchuria: environments, the senses, and natural knowledge on an Asian borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
29 October 2024
Emily Pawley, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
22 October 2024
Waqas H. Butt, Life Beyond Waste. Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2023)
15 October 2024
Paul R. Josephson, Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to Putin (Oxford Academic, 2023)
2023-2024
25 June 2024
Introductions to
Katherine Jonhston, The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-American World (OUP, 2022)
David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (OUP, 2022)
18 June 2024
Keith Pluymers, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas) (Penn Press, 2021)
11 June 2024
Thomas D. Rogers, Agriculture's Energy. The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution(UNC, 2022)
Jennifer Eaglin, Sweet Fuel. A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford, 2022)
4 June 2024
Rebecca J. H. Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World. Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (UNC Press, 2017)
28 May 2024
Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis. American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press, 2020)
21 May 2024
Magdalena Naum, Enchantment of the underground. Touring mines in early modern Sweden (Journal of Tourism History, 11:1, 1-21, 2019)
Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (PUP, 2015)
12 March 2024
David Briggs, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (JSTOR, 2018)
5 Mar 2024
Andrew Flack's article, "Dark Trails: Animal Histories Beyond the Light of Day," from Environmental History 2022.
27 Feb 2024
Jeremy Burchhardt, Lifescapes. The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870-1960(CUP, 2023)
20 Feb 2024
Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives. An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
Xuelei Huang, Scents of China. A Modern History of Smell (CUP, 2023)
23 Jan 2024
Emily O'Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History - 1st Edition (Routledge, 2024)
21 Nov 2023
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (OUP, 2015)
14 Nov 2023
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age(University of Chicago Press, 2021)
7 Nov 2023
chapter 3 from
Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske (eds.), Beyond the Lab and the Field : Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
31 Oct 2023
Simone M. Müller, The Toxic Ship. The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade (UWA Press)
24 Oct 2023
Peter S. Alagona,The Accidental Ecosystem. People and Wildlife in American Cities (University of California Press, 2024)
17 Oct 2023
Matthew Shutzer, Oil, Money and Decolonization in South Asia (Past & Present, Volume 258, Issue 1, February 2023, Pages 212–245 - Oxford Academia)
10 Oct 2023
Fredrik Norén, Emil Stjernholm, Claire C. Thomson (eds.), Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion(Springer Nature, 2023)
2022-2023
13 June 2023
The work of Emily O'Gorman. Emily O'Gorman, Macquarie University (mq.edu.au)
6 June 2023
Jennifer Keating, On Arid Ground. Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia(OUP, 2022)
23 May 2023
J. R. McNeill, Corinna R. Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Cold War (CUP, 2010)
16 May 2023
Harriet Ritvo, Recent Work in Animal History (and How We Got Here) (The Journal of Modern History, volume 94, number 2, June 2022)
9 May 2023
Dorothee Brantz, 'Animals in Urban Environmental History' in Concepts of Urban Environmental History. Sebastian Haumann, Martin Knoll, Detlev Mares (eds.) (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020), 191-202.
2 May 2023
Geoffrey Jones, Deeply Responsible Business. A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (HUP, 2023)
7 Feb 2023
Claudio Lazzaro, 'River gods: personifying nature in sixteenth-century Italy' in Renaissance Studies 25:1 Gardens and horticulture in early modern Europe (Wiley, 2011)
31 Jan 2023
Katherine Johnston, The Nature of Slavery. Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (OUP, 2023)
29 Nov 2022
Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy. Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
2019
Environmental history reading group led by Professor Harriet Ritvo
26 April 2019
Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: making Climate Change in Early America(Oxford Academic, 2016)
9 May 2019
Rebecca Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
16 May 2019
William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (CUP, 2016)
23 May 2019
Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas have shaped Asia's history (Penguin, 2018)
30 May 2019
David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past (OUP, 2019)
6 June 2019
Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: the struggle over organic farming in post-war France (University of North Caroline Press, 2018)