CHE Environmental History Colloquium
The Center for Culture, History, and Environment
of UW-Madison's Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Colloquium Purpose
The CHE Environmental History Colloquium was founded in
2002 as a way to foster cross-disciplinary conversation and collegial friendships
among faculty, staff, and grad students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
who share an interest in past environmental change, especially as it relates
to human activities and ideas. Since the launching of the Center for Culture,
History and Environment (CHE) as part of UW-Madison's Gaylord Nelson Institute
for Environmental Studies in 2007, the Colloquium has a permanent institutional
home in CHE.
From the beginning, the Colloquium has attracted dozens
of regular participants from a wide array of departments and programs,
including anthropology, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, botany, business,
English literature, environmental studies, forestry, geography, geology
and geophysics, history, history of science, landscape architecture, law,
rural sociology, science and technology studies, sociology, urban and regional
planning, and others.
Although members bring radically different disciplinary
backgrounds and perspectives to the group, they share a common conviction
that studying and understanding past environmental change is critical to
the success of their own intellectual work. Because we recognize that no
one discipline has a monopoly on methods or theories that can yield crucial
insights into environmental change in the past, the Colloquium is designed
to maximize opportunities for members to bring diverse viewpoints to bear
on shared intellectual problems.
We also work hard to build a genuine sense of community
among colleagues who might not otherwise regularly see each other outside
this context. Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to join us.
Colloquium Ground Rules
1) Colloquium participants should ideally think of themselves as joining
the group, not simply picking and choosing among topics that seem of special
interest. One of our most important goals is to build a true community
of colleagues in a number of different disciplines who all share a special
interest in past environmental change. We will be most successful in meeting
this goal if we get to know each other as colleagues and friends, not simply
as audiences for each other's performances. So please try to come to meetings
as regularly and often as you can...though you're of course welcome to
attend even if your schedule doesn't permit you to come very often.
2) Please remember that although members of the colloquium share a very
important set of common interests, we do not share disciplines, and therefore
do not share common vocabularies, common background knowledge, common theoretical
assumptions, and so on. It will therefore be VERY easy for each of us to
talk in ways that will completely mystify many other people in the room.
This may serve one of the more pernicious goals of all intellectual disciplines--intimidating
those who are not members of a privileged guild--but it will hardly serve
the purposes of community bridge-building or cross-disciplinary learning.
It will surely not help strangers become colleagues and friends. So please
remember to explain your ideas in the most accessible ways possible. One
helpful rule may be to talk with your colleagues in the colloquium as if
they were very bright undergraduates: intelligent enough to understand
anything you can competently explain to them, but ignorant enough that
they lack essential background information to understand your ideas without
your help.
3) Our most important goal is conversation, and because we have only 75
minutes for our discussions, it's crucial for discussion-launchers to remember
that their task is to launch a conversation, not just make a speech and
answer questions about it. Unless circumstances make it obviously impracticable,
we try to hold all presentations to no more than about 20-30 minutes in
order to protect the remaining time for discussion. We start shortly after
noon, and end promptly at 1:15pm. The success of a discussion-launcher
is measured by her or his success in priming the pump for a lively conversation.
Colloquium Meeting Dates for Academic
Year 2008-09
Except under unusual circumstances, Colloquium meetings
generally fall on Wednesdays from 12:00noon to 1:15pm in the CHE seminar room in 202-204 Bradley Memorial Building at 1225 Linden Drive. Here are the scheduled
dates, with discussion launchers and topics as they become available:
9/10: Gregg Mitman, Facilitator, "Launching the Year, Reintroducing Ourselves, and Brainstorming Topics and Activities for 2008-09"
9/15: Special Colloquium Session with Harrit Ritvo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Animals as Environment"
9/24:
10/8:
10/16: Special Thursday Colloquium with Ramachandra Guha, “The Career of Environmental History in South Asia: A Personal Account”
10/22:
11/5:
11/19:
12/3: Rob Nixon, UW-Madison English Dept, "Slow Violence and Environmental Time"
1/28:
2/11:
2/18: (extra session for grad student practice presentations before the ASEH conference)
3/4: (possibly devoted to debriefing after ASEH conference)
4/1: Anne Whiston Spirn, Topic TBA
4/15:
4/29:
How to Join the Seminar
If you would like to be added to the email list for the
CHE Environmental History Colloquium, just send a request to CHE's List
Administrator at che@mailplus.wisc.edu.
Past Seminar Presentations
For a complete list of past presentations to the Colloquium, click
here.
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