Environmental History

Time: Thursdays 12:30-14:00, unless otherwise stated

Meeting Location: Room 20.421, History Hub, Schwarzman Centre, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG, unless otherwise stated

Week 2 (7 May) 14:00-15:30
Schwarzman Centre, Room TBA
Writing Environmental History Workshop

A workshop for undergraduates and master’s students who are writing or considering writing essays and dissertations in environmental history or using environmental history methods. The workshop will cover some of the major themes and modes of writing in the sub-field, discuss writing and research resources, and act as a forum to ask questions to DPhil students working with diverse geographies, time periods, subjects, and approaches to the field of environmental history.

For updated meeting information, please email ryan.mealiffe@wolfson.ox.ac.uk.

Week 3 (14 May)
Wallerand Bazin (DPhil Geography and the Environment)
Bracken dissensus: a historical political ecology of tree planting in the English Lake District

This paper analyses tree planting politics in the English uplands by attending to disagreements surrounding the proliferation and management of bracken (Pteridium aquilinum). Once the most prized resource harvested on upland commons, bracken now spreads unregulated and has come to symbolise the disabled ecologies of post-pastoral landscapes. This upland fern remains a contested resource and I show how bracken is considered both an indicator of either overgrazing or under-grazing, a ghost of a lost rainforest or of a commoning system in disrepair, and a vibrant vegetation either targeted for planting trees or harvested for compost. By focusing on disagreements over the management of its spread through either planting or mechanical cutting, I shed light on the enduring socio-legal disputes over common rights and how these (re)configure tree planting. By bridging ethnographic and archival research on the vegetal politics of bracken management in the Lake District, conducted between 2024 and 2025, this paper shows the importance of interdisciplinary research in the environmental humanities to critically approach the historical political ecologies of nature conservation.

Week 5 (28 May)
Dr Kelsey Granger (IHR History Research Fellow)
Messengers of Empire: The Lives and Labour of Horses in China’s Ancient Postal System

My ongoing research centres on historic animal labour and, especially, how working with animals shaped the ways in which work was done. My research utilises a surviving corpus of over 20,000 administrative texts unearthed from the Xuanquan Postal Station 懸泉置, one of China’s ancient postal stables located on the frontier of the Han empire. Particularly given Xuanquan’s frontier location, the rapid and reliable circulation of vital goods, information, and people via postal horses underpinned administrative and imperial control in this contested region. Combining alternate textual readings, animal history theories, and behavioural studies of contemporary horses, I show how the site’s postal horses demanded modifications to their work, challenged local logistics and administration, and participated in the station’s multispecies community. In this talk, I will present research I have published so far and discuss future trajectories for exploring the broader entanglement of animal labour in empire-building.