Changing awareness—and alarm—about human civilization’s impact on the environment and climate has shaped a dynamic field of historical writing. In 2022-24, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University seeks applications from scholars working on questions related to environment and climate in an historical framework, in any period of human history, and all geographical areas.

We welcome projects that explore the mutual influence of social and physical environments, including projects that foreground the role of the environment in shaping human societies and those that highlight the role of humans in changing climatic and environmental conditions. Particular themes may include (but are not limited to) the role of technology, migration, agriculture, justice, health, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, political ideology, war, law, frontiers, property regimes, demographics, natural disasters, conservation and sustainability movements, aesthetic conceptions of natural and built landscapes, and the intellectual history of issues of environment and climate. We are particularly interested in projects that explore the intersection between histories of the environment and climate on the one hand, and histories of race, gender, and/or inequality on the other.

Davis Center Fellows

2022–23

Nicole Barnes, Duke University
Anne Berg, University of Pennsylvania
Rosie BSheer, Harvard University
Sarah Cameron, University of Maryland
William Cavert, University of St. Thomas
Benjamin Cohen, Lafayette College
Reinaldo Funes-Monzoto, University of Havana
Andrew Needham, New York University

2023–24

Sria Chatterjee, Paul Mellon Centre (London)
“(Post)Colonial Environments: The Politics of Visibility”

Jared Farmer, University of Pennsylvania
“God View: How Seeing Earth Changed Humanity”

Lijing Jiang, The Johns Hopkins University
“Fish Nations: Species, Technology, and Environments in Asia’s Aquacultural Transformation”

Neil Maher, Rutgers University-Newark and New Jersey Institute of Technology
“Wasted: An Environmental Justice History of Newark, New Jersey”

Darrin McMahon, Dartmouth College
“An American Colony in France: The Nantuckois of Dunkirk and the Dialectic of Illumination”

Lee Mordechai, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“The Worst Year to Be Alive: Interdisciplinary Tensions, Academic Boundaries, and the Premodern Environment”

Keith Pluymers, Illinois State University
“Water, Steam, and Philadelphia’s Eighteenth-Century Anthropocene”

Rhiannon Stephens, Columbia University
“Gender, Power, and Climate Change on the Swahili Coast, ca. 500-1900 CE”

Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
“The Historian's Task in the Anthropocene: Finding Hope in Japan”

Postdoctoral Fellows

Camille Goldman, Ph.D. Emory University
 “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881-1940”

David Patterson, Ph.D. University of Michigan
 “Imagining Weather in Early Medieval Francia”