Conference: August 18th – 22nd, 2025, Uppsala, Sweden
The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) is pleased to invite proposals for sessions, individual papers, roundtables, posters, and other, more experimental forms of communicating scholarship for its upcoming biennial conference in Uppsala. The theme of the conference, “Climate Histories”, aims to synthesize historical research on climate variability with present-day lived experiences, to further discourse and enrich perspectives on contemporary climate change. The deadline for submissions is 31 October 2024, 23:59 CEST.
The Conference Theme
The conference theme of “Climate Histories” puts narratives at the center to represent experiences of living with climate uncertainties. These include climate reconstruction and climate-society histories, the historiography of climate research, oral history and storytelling, as well as counter-narratives to the Eurocentric Anthropocene narrative. How might we rethink the written and material records of social adaptabilities and transformations to understand better what it means to live through an era of rapid climate change? How can we understand such experiences? How has unpredictability been explained and discussed in the past? How can written sources be used to reconstruct climate variabilities and their responses? The historical disciplines, with their vast record of human experience, provide excellent means of understanding how humans mitigated and responded to climate variability, the influence of the rate and scale of change, and the importance of individual action and social structure for shaping responses. Collaborations across disciplines – between history, archaeology, palaeoclimatology, anthropology and the broader field of the environmental humanities – are called for to explore the material records of climate change.
The theme of “Climate Histories” mirrors the research and educational focus of the ESEH 2025 hosts, the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History and the Department of History at Uppsala University, the Department of History at Stockholm University, and the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. The theme of Climate Histories also speaks to the long history of climate science in Uppsala, from Anders Celsius’ climate records in the 18th century to Svante Arrhenius’ model of atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising Earth surface temperature in the late 19th century and to the networks, organizations and institutions of earth system governance that emerged in the 20th century in the Uppsala-Stockholm region. ESEH 2025 aims to initiate collaborations with the arts, the sciences, and the broader public to explore these entangled climate histories.
Possible topics to be discussed as part of the conference’s thematic focus on “Climate Histories” include, but are not limited to:
Written and material records of social adaptabilities and transformations in relation to climate change, rapid social change and crises;
Reconstructions of the climate change-human history nexus;
The historiography of human-environment interactions and related research;
Migration and movement in response to climate change, rapid social change and crises;
Storytelling in terms of the historical and present experience of living with climate uncertainty, biodiversity loss, or rapid landscape change;
Didactics and themes for teaching climate history with practical examples of approaches and pedagogics;
Counter-narratives to the Eurocentric-Anthropocene narrative, based on labour history, social movements and indigenous history.
In addition, we warmly welcome papers, provocations and presentations on environmental history beyond the conference theme. We also invite contributions to teaching and communicating environmental history to a wider public (e.g., schools, university pedagogics, public outreach, and citizen science). Furthermore, we encourage submissions from related academic disciplines and interdisciplinary fields.
Submissions
Each person can be a primary presenter in only one session proposal, but can also serve as a chair/commentator in a second session proposal. In addition, a presenter of a conventional session can submit a proposal or participate in a ‘Different World’ session as well. All submissions should include an abstract of about 250 words and at least three keywords. The conference language is English; no submissions in other languages will be accepted. All proposals will be reviewed by the ESEH Programme Committee. All proposals have to be submitted through our online submission system.