Reflections on the field

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.

Feelings for nature : Emotions in environmental history

Andy Flack and Dolly Jørgensen, in The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, ed. KatieBarclay and Peter N. Stearns, 235-251 (Routledge, 2022) 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…

Museums at home: digital initiatives in response to COVID-19

Burke V, Jørgensen D, Jørgensen FA. 2020. Museums at home: digital initiatives in response to COVID-19. Norsk museumstidsskrift 6(2): 117-123 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…

Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices.

O’Gorman E et al (including D. Jørgensen). Environmental Humanities 11, no. 2 (2019): 427-460 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…

Bettering stories about stories about nature

Ecozon@ European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 200-207. 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…

Environmental Humanities: Entering a New Time

Jørgensen D and F Ginn. Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2 (2020): 496-500 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.…

Tracking Animals in a Pandemic

Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 626-631, published as part of a special section “Reflections: Environmental History in the Era of COVID-19” Abstract: 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…

Aesthetics of energy landscapes

Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen, “Aesthetics of Energy Landscapes,” Environment, Space, Place 10, no. 1 (2018): 1-14 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…

Backyard birds & human-made bat houses: Domiciles of the wild in 19th and 20th century cities

In Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality, ed. Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, and Philip Howell, 221-237 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) 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…

Canadian Modernity as an Icon of the Anthropocene

In Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History, edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, 348-357 (UBC Press, 2018) Abstract: 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…

Beastly belonging in the premodern North

Dolly Jørgensen, “Beastly belonging in the premodern north,” In Visions of North in Premodern Europe, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 183-205. 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…