Today I had the opportunity to speak before a group of parliamentary representatives and researchers on the topic of the environmental humanities at Riksdagen, the Swedish parliament. The event, put on by the Sällskapet Riksdagsledamöter och Forskare (RIFO), featured presentations by four Swedish researchers: an environmental scientist, an environmental philosopher, a professor of gender studies, and me as the environmental historian. The description of the event stressed the Anthropocene as a new era and asked us to consider what humanities research could contribute to new modes of thinking. My talk was titled “History for a Sustainable Future” — a title I unabashedly borrowed from fellow environmental historian Michael Egan who has a…

This week I was at the graduate seminar “Animals in Transdisciplinary Environmental History” held in Tuuru Village, Läänemaa, Estonia. The three-day event brought together a wide variety of PhD students and recent graduates working on animals based in disciplines we could categorise as environmental humanities: historians, semioticians, ethnographers, anthropologists, archeologists, cultural geographers, and literary scholars. The big goal of the seminar was to expose the students to the various approaches to ‘historical’ work from all of these different starting points. In the closing sessions which included reflections on the seminar, I remarked that each student’s work had been very solidly grounded in their ‘home’ discipline, particularly when it came to source choices. The…

My official two-weeks as Umeå University blogger has come to end. I will still be able to post things there, and may take the opportunity to do so for things related to general academia rather than my specific research project. I wanted to take this opportunity to summarise what I posted there. 1. Two kinds of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity can be a team effort where different team members each contribute from their specific discipline or an individual effort where an individual (like an environmental historian) crosses boundaries within his/her own research. 2. Publication truths. I share 10 “truths” about publishing from my experience in an interdisciplinary position crossing between natural science and…

** Originally posted on Umeå University Forskarbloggen ** Publishing in both the natural sciences and history has revealed to me that the two publishing cultures have some fundamental differences. One of the things I did not touch on in my previous discussion of publishing differences, but want to take up here, is collaboration and co-authorship. Collaboration is in its most basic form working together to accomplish a task. In the ecology department where I work, most people equate collaboration with co-authorship. If someone ‘works’ on the production of a paper, he/she will be a co-author. Of course, nothing is so simple. First, there are exclusions: for example, someone collecting field data or…

** Originally posted on Umeå University Forskarbloggen ** Publication is the bread and better of scholarship. Funders, university administration, department chairs, and fellow scholars expect—and even demand—that academics publish their findings in respectable, acceptable scholarly forms. What I’ve figured out being a historian in an ecology department is that what counts as respectable and acceptable varies greatly by discipline. I’m writing here with a fair amount of publishing experience under my belt. I have published articles in both history journals like Technology & Culture and Journal of Urban History and natural science journals including Frontiers in Ecology & Environment and Restoration Ecology. I have published an edited collection of history articles (New Natures) and have another forthcoming…