HIS33050 Science and Environment

Academic Year 2024/2025

This course explores the making and knowing of global environments from European invasions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the sixteenth century to their legacy in a climate changed world. Bringing together the history of science and environmental history, its central aim is to understand natural knowledge as a widespread and often unequal collaboration of diverse actors. The course begins with an extended unit on critical and inclusive research methods from the history of science, with special emphasis on the sociology of scientific knowledge and critiques from Indigenous and feminist standpoints. We then work through thematic units—e.g., Islands and Shorelines, Fields and Plantations, Waterscapes, and Underlands—to bring various global histories of science and environment into a comparative framework geared toward seminar discussion. Seminars will engage topics including the history of earth, environmental, and climate sciences, non-Western knowledges and cartographies, the construction of the “global” as a scientific and economic concept, racial capitalism and the commodification of nature, and the politics and violence of landscape transformation (or “terraforming”) from colonial history to climate crisis. Seminars also practice history for the future, asking how global histories of science and environment might inform on-going conversations about environmental and climate justice, for instance. This includes an in-class interview and discussion with a climate journalist. Readings, lectures, and seminars will provide scaffolding for students to create their own historical research projects on science and environment in any world region.

Keywords: climate change; commodity frontiers; colonialism; imperialism; race and capitalism; resources; scientific practice