Conferences

Saturday, February 28, 2026

“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 University’s working group on Global Environmental History is pleased to announce its Spring 2026 “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference. 
 
The “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference aims to showcase new projects in the field. The conference will included three moderated panel sessions featuring papers by current doctoral students and two lightning panels with short presentations. 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
 
Please contact environmentalhistory@yale.edu with any questions.
For more information, visit https://environmentalhistory.yale.edu/
 

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

 
Saturday, March 2, 2024

A one-day conference, including panels on “Cultures of Energy,” “Energy and Nation,” and “Geographies of Energy.”

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Yale Environmental History canceled its “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference due to Covid-19. The one-day conference was to feature panels on “Producing and Extracting Expertise,” “Landscapes of Violence, Spaces of Resistance,” and “Valuing and Managing Resources.”

Saturday, April 14, 2018

A one-day conference, including panels on “Landscape and Representation,”  “Resources and Infrastructure,” and “Power and Expertise.”

Saturday, April 22, 2017
A one day conference, including panels on “Transnational Commodities,” “Living Empires,” and “Nature by Design.”
Saturday, April 18, 2015

A one-day conference, including panels on “The Nature of Nations,” “The Struggle for Environmental Control,” and “Animals and the Commons.”  

Saturday, April 12, 2014

A one-day conference, including panel sessions on “Power and Resources,” “Water and the Urban Environment,” and “Science and Knowledge Production.” 

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Human societies have always been defined by their relationship to plants and animals, whether through the domestication efforts that underlay the earliest sedentary societies, the commodification of plants and animals that arrived in the industrial age, or the new opportunities for manipulation that genetic engineering has provided.

Friday, February 24, 2012

How have economic and environmental historians, political scientists, and others approached the concept of resources in the past and what are some directions for future work?  This two-day conference engaged an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine questions at the intersection of environmental change, economics, and political development.

 
Saturday, March 26, 2011

For environmental historians, the question of what it means– and has meant– for a landscape to be healthy provides a starting point to explore the entanglement of human and natural histories.  The same landscape– such as the tropics– can carry multiple and contradictory meanings.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Social conflicts over natural resources shape the abilities of communities and nations to access water, energy, food, and other critical needs. These struggles to control and manage resources – as well as ideas about these resources – have profound implications not only for ecological integrity but also for social justice and equity.