As a historian, I’ve thought about larger issues related to environmental history and history of technology and the way we ‘do’ those disciplines. This page highlights this reflective work.
- Drafting the Past: Dolly Jørgensen Always Has Another Project Up Her Sleeve
In episode 106 of the acclaimed history methods podcast Drafting the Past, Kate Carpenter talked with me about how I juggle my projects, what draws me to a topic, and how working at a university in Scandinavia changes my approach to scholarship. Drafting the Past Episode 106. You can listen to the podcast or read … - Human-Animal Relationships and Extension of Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This chapter investigates how the care of/for animals functioned during the COVID pandemic. We examine two cases in which humans extended care to animals that were dependent on human interventions for daily provisioning: animals in zoos and at temples in Asia. We reveal the fragility of shared human-animal ecologies and vulnerability in the lockdowns that … - Feelings for nature : Emotions in environmental history
More-than-human environments often evoke highly consequential emotional responses which are always rooted in spatial-temporal contexts. Human emotions have often directly impacted not only on the lives of more-than-human animals living both close-at-hand and in far-flung parts of the world but also on their wider habitats and the natural systems that support them. In this chapter, … - Museums at home: digital initiatives in response to COVID-19
This review surveys three types of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, from attempts to replicate the museum visit experience, to alternative replacements making use of online platforms, to initiatives that envision radically different relationships to their audiences. The selection is not intended to be representative, but instead draws into dialogue the experiences the authors had … - Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices.This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, …
- Bettering stories about stories about nature
Both environmental historians and ecocritics are in the business of simultaneously analysing the stories we tell about the human-nature relationship and creating those stories. Using the case of Kiki, an Aldabra giant tortoise on display in the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, I present three potential text types in museum displays which lend themselves … - Environmental Humanities: Entering a New Time
In this article, I and Franklin Ginn discuss the field of environmental humanities, how it has changed since the founding of the journal Environmental Humanities, and where we hope the journal will go during our tenure as co-editors. Jørgensen D and F Ginn. Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2 (2020): 496-500 Read it here (OpenAccess) - Tracking Animals in a Pandemic
The global pandemic puts a spotlight on human-animal relations and how human histories are intertwined with animal bodies. Environmental historians have demonstrated a steadily growing interest in investigating animals since the late 1980s, so thinking about animals in historical terms is nothing new. But our COVID-19 moment can prompt us to consider how environmental history—and, … - Aesthetics of energy landscapes
Abstract: Energy landscapes are entangled with technological infrastructures. Interro- gating these infrastructures is a critical move for the environmental humani- ties, as these infrastructures carry ideas as well as power across the landscape. One of the main ways in which infrastructures can be interrogated is through aesthetics, particularly the visual perception of the infrastructure but … - Backyard birds & human-made bat houses: Domiciles of the wild in 19th and 20th century cities
Abstract: In this article, apply the broader STS concept of domestication to an investigation of urban animals: How are urban animals domesticated in the sense of finding a place within the infrastructure of a city? How do the animals themselves domesticate human technology in order to make their own domus? These questions grow out of … - Canadian Modernity as an Icon of the Anthropocene
When I was asked to write a closing reflection on this volume on science and technology in Canadian history, I immediately thought of paper money as a symbol of modernity and one specific currency issue in particular: a Canadian five-dollar bill from 1935. This banknote was part of the first series of banknotes issued by … - Beastly belonging in the premodern North
In this chapter, I examine animal images on maps of medieval and early modern Scandinavia to expose how the North and its fauna were understood in the premodern era as distinct from the fauna of Continental Europe. The chapter is well illustrated with early modern maps. I argue that mapmakers chose animals deliberately to represent … - Envisioning North from a Premodern Perspective
This is the introduction to our volume exploring who and what was in the North according to people in the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras. The volume is interdisciplinary within the humanities with scholars from history, art history, and literature. It includes chapters covering thinkers across Europe, ranging from poets in ancient Greece to … - Artifacts and habitats
Abstract: Humans see distinctions between artifacts, which are constructed by human hands with human ingenuity, and nature, which we tend to think of as somehow not made by humans even if we acknowledge that little nature is left untouched by humans. An artifact at its core is related to the word artificial, meaning made by … - Anthropocene AnimalsI held a public talk called “Anthropocene Animals: How humans are changing the planet and its inhabitants” at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, in September 2016. The lecture was held in conjunction with the opening of the Perpetual Uncertainty exhibit about the nuclear age. You can see it here: https://vimeo.com/187611816
- A new place for stories: Blogging as an environmental history research tool
In this chapter I present an experiment: five pseudo-posts about blogging. I call them pseudo-posts because unlike the true online format of a blog, clickable links and embedded visuals are not possible. Yet I’ve tried to simulate the reading of a blog through indicated links (they are underlined and you can find the web addresses … - The Anthropocene as a History of Technology
This exhibit review discusses the Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands exhibit at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, within the context of how history of technology should engage with the Anthropocene concept. We argue that technology is the linchpin in the Anthropocene as an idea, and thus historians and museums of technology need to critically examine how humans … - History for a sustainable futureI gave a presentation titled ‘History for a sustainable future’ for a group of parliamentary representatives and researchers in the Sällskapet Riksdagsledamöter och Forskare (RIFO) as part of a seminar on environmental humanities on 14 October 2015. My talk stressed the need to incorporate environmental history and historical research into the environmental policy process. The full text of my …
- Podcast with Lund UniversityAn interview with me was recorded for the Department of History at Lund University on 16 October 2014. I talk about the field of environmental history, as well as my own work. The podcast starts and ends with some Swedish commentary. The interview with me goes from 05:30 to 30:00 and it is in English. Hear …
- Not by human hands: five technological tenets for environmental history in the AnthropoceneEnvironment and History 20 (2014): 479-489 Technologies in the hands of humans have turned humans into a force of nature. Environmental historians have increasingly recognised the value of history of technology to explain many environmental changes. Scholarship at the environment-technology junction, deploying ideas developed with the framework of Science and Technology Studies (STS), has revealed …