Free registration and the conference agenda are available at the conference website.
Yale Environmental History will host its seventh “New Perspectives in Environmental History” conference on Saturday, April 14, 2018 to showcase new projects in the field. The conference will include three moderated panel sessions featuring papers by doctoral students from nine different universities.
The first session, “LANDSCAPE AND REPRESENTATION,” will examine the relationship between conservation and memory in twentieth-century Boston; the role played by colonial surveys in efforts to understand the environment of the Nile Delta in British Egypt; and the interactions between enslaved Afro-Brazilians, the water system of nineteenth-century São Paulo, and the creation of patterns of urban inequality.
The second panel, “RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE,” will analyze the local socio-environmental implications of the British Gold Coast rubber campaign during the Second World War; the impact of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in the industrialization of the American Arctic; and the importance of conflicts over the damming of rivers and access to fish for the indigenous peoples of colonial New England.
The third session, “POWER AND EXPERTISE,” will explore the use of American remote sensor technologies to circumvent environmental challenges to counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Laos; attempts by the India Meteorological Department to predict the monsoon for purposes of imperial governance between 1886 and 1930; the implementation of environmental rights in the state constitutions of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania during the 1970s; and the transnational flows of expertise that characterized the construction of the Wushantou Dam in Japanese Taiwan.
Presentations will be based on papers circulated in advance to panel commentators and conference attendees. A faculty panel with BATHSHEBA DEMUTH (Brown University), JOSEPH MANNING (Yale University), and LAURA MARTIN (Williams College) will conclude the day’s activities with a discussion of innovative approaches to environmental history.