The Interdisciplinary Environmental History (IEH) Working Group seeks to foster in-depth conversations between Rutgers environmental historians and scholars of environmental studies from other disciplines such as geography, anthropology, and environmental studies. We contend that addressing the global environmental crises demands interdisciplinary approaches, which should extend beyond collaborative publications to include the regular exchange of methods, data, and perspectives across fields and in response to diverse environmental questions. Interdisciplinarity, in this sense, involves scholars actively learning from one another’s expertise.
We are organizing 6-7 seminars during the 2025-26 academic year, focusing on three main purposes: 1) to provide a forum for group members to workshop works-in-progress; 2) to engage in close reading and discussions of recent publications with their authors (internal and outside Rutgers); and 3) to offer mentorship for graduate students interested in incorporating environmental approaches in their research.
Organizers
Alastair Bellany is a Professor of History. My research to date has focused primarily on the political culture of early modern England and on the cultural origins of the English Revolution. This work has included an array of publications on news, media, and the political public sphere, on popular politics and political agency, on the interplay between early modern politics, literature and visual culture, on poison and medicine, and on the scandalous images of early Stuart court favorites. I am currently completing a textbook for Oxford University Press on the history of the Britannic Isles from prehistory to 1715, which has spun off an essay project on the politics of mid- and late- seventeenth-century antiquarian interpretations of Stonehenge. I am also beginning a major new project on late medieval and early modern climate history, tentatively titled “Looking for the Little Ice Age”, while continuing to work on a small book that explores the history of song through a socio-cultural analysis of a late Stuart hanging ballad and its migrations through various English and American afterlives.
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Hieu Phung (Asian Languages and Cultures) is an environmental historian who investigates the impacts of local culture and statecraft on the preindustrial environment, especially on water and climate. Her environmental research also involves the analysis of space, maps, and texts to uncover the construction of premodern geographic knowledge. She has written about the rivers and climate history of Vietnam and Southeast Asia and is working on her book, Dai Viet’s Heavenly Drought: Natural Anomalies and State-Building during the Little Ice Age.
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