Centre for Environmental History

CfP: War and Environment in Early Modern Eastern Europe and Eurasia

The Premodern East Slavic Europe Network is pleased to invite papers for its 6th Annual Meeting War and Environment in Early Modern Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

The conference will focus on six interconnected themes:
1. War in the Environment: Perception, Knowledge, and the Construction of Nature
2. War with the Environment: Climate, Terrain, Animals, and Resources
3. War against the Environment: Destruction, Transformation, and Resource Use
4. Food and Health in Wartime
5. War, Migration, and Social Responses
6. After Violence: Restoration, Adaptation, and Long-Term Change

The conference is explicitly interdisciplinary and welcomes contributions from history, environmental and military history, archaeology, geography, literary and cultural studies, art history, the history of knowledge, and related fields. We particularly encourage comparative and transregional approaches as well as studies that bridge established boundaries between military, environmental, social, economic, and cultural history.
 
Contact: 
Prof. Dr. Julia Herzberg; Prof. Dr. Jan Kusber 

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2026.

Time: 11.03.2027 - 12.03.2027
Place: Mainz, Germany

>Details

>Details about the East Slavic Europe Network

Vacancy: 
Two Reserch Fellows - Contemporary History / Eastern European History

At the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento, a selection is announced for the award of 2 research contracts with a fixed-term employment contract for the exclusive purpose of carrying out the following research project “Fluid Curtain. Managing the Danube River During the Cold War”.

Deadline for applications: 15 October 2026, 12.00 noon.

>Details
>English courtesy translation

61^st ITH Conference: Working nature – exploring intersections of labour history and political ecology

The bundle of human-made ecological crises has reached a point where most earth scientists see an actual breaching of ecological thresholds, not only in relation to climate change but also six of nine processes for which “planetary boundaries” have been defined. In this context, the interdisciplinary field of political ecology (which dates to at least the 1970s) has experienced a spectacular boom. In a certain sense, it has become the interdisciplinary critical social science of our days, a field in which both academic and political concerns converge. In the English-speaking world, political ecology has proved to be strongly inflected by historical reasoning, with several authors highlighting the entanglements between material extraction, energy carriers (particularly fossil ones), ecological over-use, capitalist economic development, and exploitation.

While the history of work and labour relations have a place in these studies, many commentators have noticed an ongoing non-communication between labour history and political ecology. Despite such (self-)critical assessments, the last decades already have seen numerous instances scholarship at the intersection of “labour” and “environmental history” as well as “political ecology”. It thus seems both timely and necessary to bring global labour history and historical political ecology into a more structured and fruitful dialogue, to assess existing research at the intersection of both and to explore further avenues of research. While open to a broad spectrum of topics and approaches – from the carbon nexus to agrarian ecologies, from toxic through contested to multispecies labour –, this conference will insist on “labour” as one major category of differentiation in past and current ecological predicaments.

Organiser: International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH)

Early bird registration ends on 3 July.

Time: 17.09.2026 - 19.09.2026
Place: Linz, Austria

>Details

CfP: 14th Biennial European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) Conference

The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) is pleased to invite proposals for panel sessions, individual papers, book presentations, posters, roundtables, and more experimental presentation formats for its upcoming biennial conference. The conference theme, Environmental History Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries, aims to highlight and reinforce the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature and culture of environmental history.

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2026.

Zeit: 07.09.2027 - 10.09.2027
Ort: Salzburg, Austria

>Details

Umweltgeschichte im Fokus: Wie Simone Gingrich die Vergangenheit für eine nachhaltige Zukunft erforscht

Die historischen Entwicklungen von landwirtschaftlicher Intensivierung, Wiederbewaldung und der Expansion tierischer Produktion haben nicht nur die Ernährungsgrundlagen für wachsende Bevölkerungen geschaffen, sondern auch erhebliche ökologische Konsequenzen nach sich gezogen – von steigenden Treibhausgasemissionen bis hin zu Veränderungen in globalen Stoffkreisläufen.

Antrittsvorlesung
Umweltgeschichte im Anthropozän
Univ.Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Simone Gingrich

Montag, 24. März 2025, um 17:00 Uhr
BOKU University - Ilse-Wallentin-Haus - SR 29
Peter-Jordan-Straße 82, 1190 Wien
und im LIVESTREAM auf https://youtube.com/live/ais7V_yYNcQ?feature=share