Each year, a distinguished expert in a social-scientific research field related to climate and environment issues is invited to campus to give a public lecture and participate in other academic enterprises. 

The 2024-25 distinguished lecture was offered by Bathsheba Demuth. 

The SIES Distinguished Lecture was held on April 2, 2025 at 5:00 pm in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224). Her talk, "History from the Dogsled: Animals, Climates, and the Stakes of Telling the Past," explored the relationship between animal emotions and British and Russian imperial ambitions in modern-day Alaska. 

Demuth also lead a Graduate Masterclass, open to PhD students, on April 1 from 9 to noon. 

Bathsheba Demuth also lead a masterclass for graduate students on Tuesday, April 1 from 10am-1pm in the Tea Room. The topic was "Narrative Style and Worldbuilding in Environmental History."

This masterclass discussed narrative style and form as elements of historical argumentation, particularly in environmental history. From how to use a wide range of secondary sources and technical literatures, to reading primary sources for details relevant to building coherent scenes and characters, the group discussed how to match content with form and develop an intellectually rigorous but engaging narrative voice. By reading several authors who span academic and non-academic publishing, they thought through the challenges and opportunities of writing history that is both literary and driven by argument and empirical precision.

2024-2025: Bathsheba Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her work focuses on the environmental history of the Russian and North American Arctic and she is author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, published by W. W. Norton (2019). Prof. Demuth completed her PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a project titled The Long Water: A Biography of the Yukon River that "examines how legal ideas—from where law originates to private property, rights to hunt or fish, and Indigenous land claims—and the ecology of the Yukon River mingled and changed each other over the past 200 years."

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2023-2024: Jo Guldi is Professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory University and a historian of capitalism. Her books include The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History, The Long Land war: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, The History Manifesto, and The Road to Power. She completed her PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley and later held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Chicago and the Harvard Society of Fellows. Prof. Guldi was also previously Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown, and Full Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.

The Shapiro Initiative for Environment and Society is happy to offer fellowship support for pre-ABD students in the Social Science Division working on topics with a strong connection to environmental history. We can offer funds for travel between $500 and $2,500. To be considered for funding, please submit the application form and a 500-word proposal with a provisional budget along with a recent CV.

Proposals are due May 19 2025 at 5pm.

April 24 and 25, 2025

Keynote Speakers: Laleh Khalili and Dominic Boyer

For too long, energy studies have tended to focus on familiar fuels considered in isolation, especially oil and coal. This day-long symposium instead seeks to explore new “metabolic” approaches that trace diverse flows of energy and their transformative dynamics, materialized in spatial infrastructures, built environments, and institutions, throughout economy and society. In this holistic understanding, the concept of energy can extend across the whole web of life, from hydroelectric reservoirs and fodder grass to chicken protein, tailing ponds, and nuclear waste. It encompasses the vital sociometabolic processes that mediate, flow, and result from diverse sites of capitalist development and biogeophysical transformation, ranging from the domestic household and the metropolitan region to the factory farm and the financial terminal, as well as the waste dump and, indeed, the planetary biosphere as a whole.

Such a perspective opens up urgent new questions for scholars working across the environmental social sciences and humanities. How have the dynamics of capital–across time and space–shaped and been shaped by (geo)political strategies to harness, store, distribute, and deploy diverse forms of energy (including fossil fuels)? How have historical and contemporary forms of empire, military power, and territorial governance mediated the energetics of capitalist development across diverse spheres of life, from extraction, production, and transportation to social reproduction and waste management? How have changing infrastructures for appropriating, processing, transporting, and deploying energy in turn shaped historical structures of power, profit, and even ideology, political subjectivity, and social thought? Which downstream sectors, from agriculture to aluminum and fertilizer production, deserve attention as major and entrenched energy consumers, and thus as drivers of historical and ongoing forms of socioenvironmental destruction and crisis? And finally, how might this holistic understanding of energy metabolism inform our understanding of contemporary strategies and struggles to restructure–or perhaps transcend–inherited fossil fuel-fired, carbon-intensive forms of social life?

Our goal with this event is to place climate change and other planetary environmental emergencies firmly at the center of our research and pedagogy in the social sciences and humanities. We adopt a reflexively historical and spatial perspective on such questions, especially in relation to the environmental genealogies of capital, empire, racism, and colonialism, as well as in relation to the dynamics of urbanization, extraction, agrarian change, energy generation, and waste processing, among other issues. We also center questions of uneven spatial development and unequal ecological exchange in our approach to current debates on the ‘Anthropocene’. Finally, we are deeply interested in questions of conceptualization and method, since we believe that knowledge-formations on such issues are intermeshed with ongoing struggles over the shape of present and future socio-environmental arrangements.