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 literature, 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. For instance, a researcher studying agricultural practices and famine history in tropical regions could gain valuable insights by engaging with work on water and climate issues in grassland and arid environments.
We plan to organize 6-7 seminars during the 2026-27 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.
The 2026-27 IEH will build upon its foundation under CCA’s support in 2005-26 and the success of the 2024-25 Environmental History Seminar (EHS), a collaborative initiative between Rutgers and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Although IEH was not able to
remain active during the 2025-26 due to one of the group leaders’ sabbatical, its presence under CCA’s support has helped attract new members from across the university. We believe that renewing this support will allow us to consolidate this momentum and further
expand the group’s activities and reach.
Should we invite outside speakers to campus, in addition to seeking funding from CCA, we plan to request additional support from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History.
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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