“New Perspectives in Environmental History”
Yale University
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Humanities Quadrangle Room L02 (lower auditorium)
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Yale Environmental History is pleased to announce its Spring 2026 “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference. Registration is now open (click here).
The “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference aims to showcase new projects in the field. The conference includes three moderated panel sessions and two lightning rounds to feature research by doctoral students in the New England and mid-Atlantic region.
The first panel, ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS, addresses large-scale environmental transformation projects, from the downstream ecological consequences of soybean cultivation in Brazil’s Pantanal Wetland to colonial sanitary regimes shaped by railway expansion in Delhi to transnational scientific connections on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
The second panel, ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, offers diverse ways of thinking about how politics underpins environmental history. Panelists will share a pedagogical reflection on teaching the environmental history of disability, a study of how 1970s environmental regulation shaped land development in the American West, and an analysis of Kazakhstani opposition to Soviet nuclear testing in the late Soviet Union.
The third panel, ENVIRONMENTS ON THE MOVE, examines the relationship between mobility and environment across three waterscapes: acts of enslavement and freedom-making in the swamp-like landscapes of nineteenth-century Brazil; Indigenous legal systems governing waterways in the Upper Mississippi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and migrant fishers moving with the rhythms of monsoon winds in the Gulf of Tonkin along the Vietnam–China border in the twentieth century.
The first lightning round, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT, zooms into the intersection of the history of science and environmental history through four cases: the use of Chimpanzees in laboratory biomedical and conservation science, the legacies of the Charney hypothesis on the feedback loop between vegetation loss and drought, breast milk biomonitoring as a gendered indicator of environmental pollution, and the controversy surrounding elephant conservation and sustainable development.
The second lightning round, REGIONS AND LANDSCAPES, analyzes different ways of conceptualizing, constructing, and connecting a region: photographic documentation of displacement and place-identity in the United States; new periodizations of climate change in mid-Atlantic and New England regions based on nineteenth-century ice trade records, hiking and biopolitics in the national parks of wartime Japan, and the construction of subterranean infrastructure linking Egypt and Sinai.
Panel presentations will be based on papers circulated in advance to panel commentators and conference attendees. Lightning rounds will feature brief topical introductions without circulated papers. A faculty panel, featuring Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University), Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard University), and Laura J. Martin (Williams College), will conclude the day with a discussion of innovative approaches to environmental history.
Yale Conveners include Yale doctoral students Henry Jacob and Xinyue Zhang and Paul Sabin, Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History.
The conference format is based on successful northeast regional conferences held at Yale in recent years. For more information on past conferences, including agendas and paper abstracts, visit
We are grateful to our Co-Sponsors and Supporters:
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
Yale Environmental Humanities
Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences Humanities Division
Yale Department of History
