History 691E - S-History & Climate Emergency

What does accelerating climate change mean for the discipline of history? How should historians, as scholars who study the past, respond to anthropogenic climate change and the broader ecological emergency that define the contemporary world? In this course, we study how these concerns are increasingly reflected in historians? research, writing, and debate. The climate emergency provides a point of departure for the course. However, we also examine historians? engagement with the Anthropocene, a concept that identifies modern humanity as a major planetary force, one that is transforming earth?s physical systems in ways that imperil life on earth. How has this concept been embraced and challenged by historians and other historical interpreters, and what alternatives have been proposed? In what ways are historians? approaches to long-established areas of inquiry such as colonialism, empire, and capitalism being shaped by ecological crisis? We also explore themes that, in the context of this crisis, have attracted growing attention from historians, including resource extraction, extinction, and nonhuman histories, and consider possible future directions. The geographical scope of the course is global. Although we focus primarily on modern and early modern times, there is also some consideration of earlier time periods.