"Ohio State Students at the COP28 U.N. Climate Negotiations" was published by the Mershon Center (September 30, 2024).
Henry Misa has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Education, International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office. His dissertation leverages manuscript work in multiple languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkic) alongside his extensive work in environmental history to examine the ways that two very different Central Asian political regimes responded to a medieval climate crisis (September 4, 2024).
On August 27th, recent graduate Neil Humphrey took part in a historical marker dedication at Headlands Beach State Park. Neil currently works as a historical researcher for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He organized this dedication in conjunction with the American Physical Society. This historical marker commemorated events that occurred here on February 23, 1987. That day, light emitted some 170,000 years ago from an exploding supernova (dubbed 1987A) reached earth. The Irvine Michigan-Brookhaven Detector, located some 2,000 feet below the park in the Morton Salt Mine, detected a burst of neutrinos that was verified by another detector located inside a zinc mine in Kamioka, Japan. This was the first record of interstellar neutrinos and birthed the field of neutrino astronomy. In attendance were members of the Ohio General Assembly, the U.S. Congress, and leading physicists from numerous American universities. Neil capped the ceremony off with a speech highlighting this site's importance for the histories of Ohio, the United States, the field of physics, and the global scientific community (August 27, 2024).
Bart Elmore was a guest on the NPR podcast episode, "Your future's in the trash can: How the plastic industry promoted waste to make money" (May 26, 2024).
Jennifer Eaglin has received an SI Core Faculty Scholarly Activity Award to support her visit to Brazil’s nuclear power plants (May 2024).
The Environmental History Initiative ran a film festival as their contribution to the broader Ohio State Earth Day event. Three films were shown over two days. Each focused on a historical environmental issue while detailing potential ways to move forward to achieve just, equitable, and sustainable futures. Each film featured an expert that provided opening remarks and moderated a Q&A session. The films were King Coal, Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire, and Canary (April 18 and 19, 2024).
Chris Otter published “Planetary Agglomeration,” in Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750: Technonatures in the Global North, Palgrave, 2024, 23-43. He also contributed to “Hybrid Cities: Agency, Scale, and Power—A Conversation Between Matthew Gandy, Dorothee Brantz, and Chris Otter,” which appeared in the same volume. (March 13, 2024).
Kip Curtis published a research essay, "First you need the farmers: The microfarm system as a critical intervention in the alternative food movement," in The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development about the alternative food movement and the microfarm project (March 21, 2024).
OSU history PhD and current assistant professor of environmental history at the University of Dayton, Dan Vandersommers, was a finalist for the ASEH George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history published during the preceding year (April 3-7, 2024). His book, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive, was published in the Environment and Society series at the University of Kansas Press, September 2023.
Emily Rabung, a doctoral student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources, won the best poster prize at the 2024 American Society for Environmental History Conference in Denver! Her poster was titled "Bureaucratic Militarization of the Environment: Implementation of The Endangered Species Act by the Department of Defense" (April 3-7, 2024).
Neil Humphrey defended his dissertation titled "In a Dog's Age: Fabricating the Family Dog in Modern Britain, 1780-1920." His advisor was Chris Otter and his dissertation committee members were Bart Elmore, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Dan Vandersommers (March 11, 2024).
John Brooke, with Eric Herschthal of the University of Utah, and Jed O Kaplan of the University of Calgary, published “Commodities, Carbon, and Climate,” in The Oxford Handbook of Commodity History, Jean Stubbs, William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Jonathan Curry-Machado, Jelmer Vos, co-eds. (Oxford University Press, January 10, 2024).
In honor of his promotion to the rank of professor, Bart Elmore gave his Inaugural Lecture titled "Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future," on February 21 at The Ohio State University Faculty Club.
Neil Humphrey published his article, "Working Like a Dog: Canine Labour, Technological Unemployment, and Extinction in Industrialising England," in the February 2024 issue of Environment and History.
Bart Elmore joined the Tell Me Your Why podcast to to talk about putting an environmental lens on history, how nature shapes the course of human events, and how his spiritual journey set him up for thinking about the big picture, Tell Me Your Why, (Jan. 6, 2024).
Nicholas Breyfogle and Bart Elmore were interviewed about Ohio State's COP28 education abroad program in "Ohio State Students Travel to Dubai for Climate Conference," Ohio State News, (January 4, 2024).
Jim Harris published the book chapter “Raising a Healthy Nation: Provisioning Public Health in British Schools c. 1890-1914,” in The Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic: Histories of Public Health and Schooling. Edited by Kellie Burns and Helen Proctor. New York: Routledge, (2024).
James Esposito published his second article, "Canaries, camouflets, and carbon monoxide: making ‘Proto Man’ in Britain’s tunnelling war 1915–1918" on December 23, 2023 in History and Technology.
Bart Elmore was interviewed about the 2023 U.N. climate summit, COP28, on "Tech Tuesday: Looking at Cyberattacks Against Major Organizations", WOSU, (Dec. 19, 2023).
Bart Elmore, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Ohio State students met with Columbus, OH, mayor Andrew Ginther in Dubai, "The Ohio Mayor Looking for Climate Solutions at COP28 in Dubai," Bloomberg, (Dec. 5, 2023).
Nicholas Seay’s paper, "By Tractor and Plane: Pesticides and Chemical Fertilizers in the Valleys of Soviet Tajikistan" was chosen as co-winner for the Graduate Student Paper Award at the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) 2023 Annual Conference at the University of Pittsburgh (October 19-22, 2023).
Jennifer Eaglin provided the opening remarks for the Brazil Gateway Forum on Climate Change, hosted by the Ohio State University. This event was sponsored by The Ohio Program and Center for Latin American Studies and in collaboration with Ohio State's Sustainability Institute and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (December 5, 2023).
Nicholas Breyfogle and Bart Elmore were guests on the podcast, "Business Extra: Climate Edition - The History of COP," The National News, (Nov. 29, 2023).
To celebrate his newest publication, Country Capitalism, Bart Elmore embarked on a nationwide book tour. Beginning at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and ending at Kennesaw State University just outside of his hometown of Atlanta, Bart's tour attracted crowds at venues ranging from local bookstores to land grant universities (2023).
Tina Sessa published her book, Scale and The Study of Late Antiquity: Collected Essays from the 14th Meeting of Shifting Frontiers in the fall of 2023.
Once upon a time, Coke’s bottles were an environmentalist's dream: stylish glass bottles washed and reused over and over, leaving no pollution. Today #CocaCola is the world’s biggest #plastic producer and polluter. What happened? Bart Elmore is featured in this new investigative short documentary "EXPOSED: How Coke Killed the Refillable Bottle" (Oct. 4, 2023).
Nick Breyfogle, Jennifer Eaglin, and Bart Elmore received a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT), Graduate Professional Development Grant, for the Environmental History Initiative. The grant will support a History GRA for 2023-24 to work on the project.
Tina Sessa delivered the final keynote lecture titled "Perceiving Plague" for Bucknell University's Humanities Center series, "Pandemic: Contagion and the Body Politic" on April 6, 2023. She gave a second talk on plague, "Narrating Plague: Parts and Wholes" at Georgetown University during a two-day workshop on "Epidemic Millennium: Interdisciplinary Study of Disease before 1000" (April 21-22, 2023).
Neil Humphrey published his review of Chris Pearson's book Dogopolis: How Humans and Dogs Made Modern New York, London, and Paris in the April 2023 edition of the Journal of British Studies.
Chris Otter discussed his book Diet for a Large Planet on The Podolsky Salon, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, (April 19, 2023).
Nick Breyfogle (with Bryan Mark and Fazlul Haq, Geography and Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center) received a Mershon Center Catalyst Grant to support the project “Water Diplomacy in the Age of Climate Change: Transboundary Indus Basin Water Conflict between Pakistan and India.” He also gave the lecture: “Researching and Writing Russian History in a Time of War,” Taft Lecture, University of Cincinnati (April 12, 2023).
Daniel Vandersommers (PhD, 2014), Assistant Professor of History at the University of Dayton, has authored Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive (University of Kansas Press, 2023).
Nick Breyfogle presented “Understanding Climate at Lake Baikal,” at the American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, March 23, 2023; and “Water Crisis on the Blue Planet: What Water’s Past Tells us about Humanity’s Future,” Ohio State Arts and Sciences Webinar and History Department Clio Talk, (March 22, 2023).
James Esposito published an article entitled “Oxygen Sense: Creating Embodied Knowledge to Promote Health Innovation in the Royal Air Force, 1939–45” with Technology and Culture (February 3, 2023).
James Esposito published his review of Susan R. Grayzel’s book, The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terror of Total War, for H-Net.
John Brooke presented his paper, “Historians and the Anthropocene: A state-of-being, or a process-of-becoming?” on a panel entitled, “The Anthropocene v. Climate Change as Historical Frameworks,” at the AHA conference, Philadelphia (January 7, 2023).
Chris Otter published his article "Socializing the Technosphere" in Technology and Culture, 63:4, (October 2022) as well as "Milk in Motion: Logistical Geographies in Twentieth-Century Britain," in Global Food History (Oct. 27, 2022).
Kip Curtis presented his paper, “Cultivating Sustainable Change: Flipping the Script on Community Engagement,” at the Engaged Scholars Consortium in Athens, GA (September 22, 2022).
Nickolas Breyfogle was awarded the Herbert Feis Award in 2022; a prize offered annually to recognize distinguished contributions to public history.
Nicholas Breyfogle has given multiple recent talks: “History through Images: The Picturing Black History Project” at the Teaching Black History Conference, University of Buffalo; “The Origins of the Barguzin Nature Reserve” at the European Society for Environmental History Conference, Bristol, UK (July 2022); “Lake Baikal and the Hydroelectric Moment in World History,” in the Lecture Series “Nature, Environment and Society in Eurasia,” at the University of Vienna (April 27, 2022); “Rethinking the 19th century through Environmental History,” at the NYU Jordan Center for Russian Studies (May 2022); and numerous talks on the history of the war in Ukraine.
Bart Elmore published an article, "It could soon be harder to find produce untouched by chemicals," in The Washington Post (June 9, 2021).
"Histories of the Future: Urban Microfarming as an Elegant Solution for a Just and Sustainable World" by Kent "Kip" Curtis was posted on Niche-Canada.org (April 6, 2021).
Kip Curtis was featured in , "Mansfield Microfarms craft sustainable urban agriculture model" by the College of Arts and Sciences (Feb. 12, 2021).