“New Perspectives in Environmental History”
Yale University
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Humanities Quadrangle Room L02 (lower auditorium)
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Conference registration will open in January 2026.
9:30 Opening Remarks:
Paul Sabin (Yale University)
9:45-10:50 PANEL 1: ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS
Chair: Alan Mikhail (Yale University)
Caroline Kreysel (MIT, VU Amsterdam)
“Washing down the plantation: a downstream history of intensive land use and the Pantanal Wetland (1970s-2000)”
Ayushi Chauhan (Boston University)
“Sanitary Futures: Disease, Railways, and the Politics of Improvement in Colonial Delhi, 1857-1900”
Jason Chan (Harvard University)
“Circumpolar Cooperation, Subarctic Canada, and Experiences of Polar Infrastructure: Development along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, 1975”
10:50-11:10 COFFEE BREAK
11:10-12:15 PANEL 2: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
Chair: Sarah Phillips (Boston University)
Max Charvin Bridge (Brown University)
“Teaching the Environmental History of Disability: Pedagogy as Field-Building”
Nicholas Morrison (University of Maryland)
“Shielding the Steppe: The Semipalatinsk Test Site and Environmentalism in Late Soviet Kazakhstan, 1964-1994”
B. Jack Hanly (MIT)
“Assessing Development’s Impacts: Environments between Paperwork and Software”
12:15-12:40 LIGHTNING ROUND I: SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
Chair: Deborah Coen (Yale University)
Brigid Prial (UPenn)
“Save the Chimpanzee (Labs)!: Conservation and Biomedical Science in Transnational Species Politics, 1945 - 1980”
Oliver Lucier (Yale University)
“ ‘The Desert Feeds Back Upon Itself!’: The Charney Hypothesis and the Shifting Relationship
of Plants, Oceans, and Drought, 1970s-2000s”
Abigail Higgins (Harvard University)
“ ‘Contaminated Mothers’: Breast Milk Biomonitoring adn the Gendered Politics of Embodied Risk from Michigan to Akwesasne, 1973-1999”
Noah Kulick (Johns Hopkins University)
“The Elephant in the Room: The Humane Society of the United States, The Zimbabwe Trust, and the First International Sustainability Controversy”
12:40-1:40 BUFFET LUNCH (free to all registered attendees)
1:40-2:45 PANEL 3: ENVIRONMENTS ON THE MOVE
Chair: Nurfadzilah Yahaya (Yale University)
Eduarda Araujo (Harvard University)
“Ancestral Waterscapes: The Magic of Invisibility, Freedom, and Enslavement in 19th-century Brazil”
Karl Nycklemoe (SUNY- Stonybrook)
“Legal Relations: European Navigation Through Upper Mississippi Indigenous Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”
Anke Wang (Cornell University)
“Profits of Mobility: The Monsoon and Migrant Fishers in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1880–1950”
2:45-3:10 LIGHTNING ROUND II: REGIONS AND LANDSCAPES
Chair: Karl Jacoby (Columbia University)
Owen Clow (Fordham University)
“The Photography of Dysplacement: Project DOCUMERICA and Place-Identity as a Subject of Environmental Concern”
Charlotte Leib (Yale University)
“A new lens on the end of the Little Ice Age: Periodizing climate change in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions with nineteenth-century ice trade records”
Aaron Stark (Brown University)
“Hiking as Metaphor: National Parks, Recreational Biopolitics, and the Kinesthetic Culture of Homefront Mobilization in Wartime Japan”
Marlaina Yost (Yale University)
“Constructing Security: The Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel and Post-Naksa Subterranean Infrastructure”
3:10-3:40 COFFEE BREAK
3:40-5:00 CLOSING FACULTY PANEL
Moderators: Henry Jacob (Yale University) and Xinyue Zhang (Yale University)
Faculty Presenters:
Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University)
Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard University)
Laura Martin (Williams College)
