Distinguished Fulbright chair in US Environmental History / AMERICAN STUDIES

Grant Activity: The grantee would be asked to teach one 4 hour course at the MA level each term, plus one BA level course in the fall term. In the spring term, two hours would be given over to advising of students and to play a central role in organizing a major academic conference. University of Southern Denmark (SDU) will defray the costs of that conference. At the undergraduate level, courses taught are within the fields of American history, literature, and politics, as well as American Studies. At the graduate level, the MA degree in American Studies has a mix of electives and required seminars. The teaching load is 6 hours per week each term. The format is a mix of seminars, lectures, discussions, presentations and oral reports. The average course size varies according to level: graduate courses usually have 15-25 students, and undergraduate level classes have a maximum of 35 students. Students purchase their own books, which may be supplemented by materials placed on the intranet program “Blackboard.”

Specialization(s): A scholar in Environmental History or American Studies focused on the environment.

Additional Qualifications: Ph.D. and at least 6 years of teaching experience required. Aadvanced associate professor or full professors preferred.

Location(s): Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark-Odense

Length of Grant: 10 months
Starting Date: September 1, 2010

Comments: The Center would like to involve the Fulbright Scholar primarily in the education of its c. 45 MA students. There are also possible research opportunities. The Center is currently involved in a number of interdisciplinary research projects and the Chair would be invited to participate in these projects as well as a number of conferences and seminars the Center organizes each year. The Dean has set aside funding for a conference whose theme and participants will be shaped in a dialogue between the grantee and the faculty. The Chair will have access to a wide range of electronic journals, the university library and the Royal Library. Therefore, it will be possible to continue working on major projects. The scholar will be given an e-mail address and will have access to the usual electronic resources. Office space is provided. Some secretarial assistance is available. The university library is fully computerized and books can be ordered from any computer. In addition, American journals are available in full text format through any computer within the university network. It is possible to use PowerPoint, DVD etc. Housing will be found for the scholar and decided upon after consultation with the scholar. The cost per month including utilities is approximately $1,000-$1,500.

Application Deadline: August 1, 2009

For more information, contact:

Professor David E. Nye
Center for American Studies
SDU - Odense
Odense 5230 M
Denmark

Conveners:
Cornelia Luedecke: C.Luedecke@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
James R. Fleming: jfleming@colby.edu

The sky too belongs to the Landscape: —the ocean of air in which we live and move, with its continents and islands of cloud, its tides and currents of constant and variable winds… in which the bolt of heaven is forged, and the fructifying rain condensed… can never be to the zealous Naturalist a subject of tame and unfeeling contemplation — Luke Howard

Looking up, whether casually or with instruments, involves both frameworks and focal points.  To observe the sky, whether clouds, sunsets, portents, or myriad other phenomena, is to visualize it, combining impressions, information, assumptions, and apprehensions.  To represent the observations, whether with the naked eye or mediated, on rock, stained glass, paper, canvas, photographic film, or digitally, involves theory, language, technique, and cultural assumptions. It involves looking at it in a social and historical context.

The scientific gaze has trended toward full automation and abstraction, with data being acquired, analyzed and interpreted often without any direct visual inspection or representation.  This has certainly not been the case historically in religious or aesthetic traditions.  In landscape painting, for example, at least half of the scene is from the horizon up.

The International Commission on History of Meteorology invites historians of science and technology, art historians, artists, filmmakers, meteorologists, and other interested scholars to examine and explore the visual languages, cultural meanings, and representations of the sky—especially its weather and climate-related phenomena—in all its transient and transcendent glory.

Registration deadlines are announced on the Congress website: http://www.conferences.hu/ichs09/

Please email proposed paper title, 250 word abstract, and short bio to either of the symposium conveners before Dec. 15th.

For more information, see the series description.

The first agenda item was the announcement of the Envirotech Article Prize recipient, Paul Sutter (see the  complete write-up on his article here). Because the prize is handed out every 18 months, the next prize will be awarded at ASEH in Portland in 2010. We are in need of a volunteer to join the prize committee, so if you are interested in being on this worthwhile committee, please contact Hugh Gorman at hsgorman@mtu.edu.

Finn Arne also spoke about the website http://envirotechweb.org which is Envirotech’s forum for sharing information. There is a section where Syllabi from relevant classes can be posted. If you have a syllabus (undergraduate or graduate course) that in some way touches on both environmental history and history of technology, please email the syllabus to Finn Arne at news@envirotechweb.org so that it can be posted for all to share. Finn Arne is also moving the email listserv over to envirotech.web so that it can be more easily maintained in the future.

Several attendees contributed new book / series announcements. Ralf Brand, who was unable to attend, asked that we announce the recent publication a special issue of the journal Built Environment (vol 34, no 2, 2008) focused on sustainable mobility. Jacob Hamblin mentioned a recent special issue of Diplomatic History (vol 32, no 4, 2008) that focused on environmental politics.

As a group, we also congratulated Joel Tarr on his Leonardo da Vinci award.

There was a brief discussion about Envirotech’s funds. We had a little over $1,600 in our account after the article prize money was given out. In addition, we received contributions of $138 at the lunch. We currently subsidize the meal graduate students who attend the envirotech meeting at both SHOT and ASEH and give out the article prize every 18 months. Tom Zeller suggested that we pursue an idea brought forward at a prior meeting about a graduate student conference travel grant – perhaps something small like $200 at each SHOT and ASEH for a student presenting an envirotech-relevant paper. If you would like to serve as a member of a committee to discuss such a proposal, please email Hugh Gorman at hsgorman@mtu.edu.

We are very glad Joel received this recognition for his contributions to the field and would like to join SHOT in congratulating him.

The SHOT award citation begins like this: “Since the 1990s, one of the most exciting developments in historical studies has been the convergence of environmental and technological history. Joel Arthur Tarr began to explore this convergence a generation earlier. His scholarship, both painstaking and pioneering, has pointed the way for many scholars now working at the intersection of technological and environmental history. From the late 1960s to this day, as a scholar, educator, and citizen, he has studied the interplay of human-built systems, processes, and values with the natural environment. Beginning his career as an urban historian, he asked new questions, examined new sources, and synthesized a new range of disciplinary approaches. At once an urban, environmental, and technological historian, Joel Tarr demonstrates the impossibility and irrelevance of labeling subfields, when the unifying and ultimate topic is the story of humanity’s interactions with the non-human world.”

Joel Tarr is the Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History & Policy in the Department of History, Carnegie Mellom University.

The breadth and depth of the submissions for the 2008 Envirotech Article Prize competition was incredibly impressive. The committee read twenty-five articles published between January 2006 and June 2008 for the prize. The shear number of recent publications in the emerging field of envirotech shows just how far the field has come in the past few years.

The breadth of the articles was most impressive. Articles were published not only in the journals specializing in environmental and technological history such as Environmental History, Environment and History, and Technology and Culture, but also in journals specializing in other fields, including the history of science, environmental policy, economic history, and American studies, and as chapters in edited book collections. Considering the broad range of submission, we cannot discuss each article, but the committee wanted to mention some of the broader themes and trends apparent in recent work in the field.

The submissions revealed how the theoretical frameworks of envirotech inquiries have continued to grow. William Rollins’ piece, “Reflections on a Spare Tire: SUVs and Postmodern Environmental Consciousness,” Environmental History, 2006, 11: 684-723, employs a cultural analysis to explore the relationship between the rise of the SUV and environmental thought. Besides being occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Rollins’ article offers some very interesting theoretical musings about modernist and post-modernist transportation systems. Several articles, including Sutter’s prize winner and Tsegaye Habte Nega, “Saving Wild Rice: The Rise and Fall of the Nett Lake Dam,” Environment and History 14 (2008): 5-39, explicitly employed Science, Technology & Society (STS) methodologies such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to understand how actors and their positions influenced environmental and technological outcomes. Marionne Cronin, “Northern Visions: Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919-1928” (Technology and Culture 2007, 48: 303-330) shows how a well-known history of technology framework – technological styles – can be reanalyzed and assessed by including geography and geology as forces. These articles show an increasing incorporation of frameworks from various historical disciplines into envirotech, strengthening the methodological toolkit considerably.

Subject matter was extremely wide-ranging from medieval water control to nineteenth-century scientific surveys to modern sustainable development, but environmental justice emerged as a key area of inquiry for the envirotech junction. In Nancy Langston’s article, “The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health” (Environmental History 2008, 13: 41-65), we see how a conjuncture of political, scientific, and conceptual factors allowed the introduction of DES as a medical treatment and the deplorable environmental consequences. Likewise, Julie Sze framed her contribution on DES, “Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology, and Environmental Justice” (American Quarterly 2006, 58: 791-814) as a study of “technologically polluted bodies,” building on Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept. Other environmental justice pieces included David Torres-Rouff, “Water Use, Ethnic Conflict and Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles” (Pacific Historical Review 2006, 75: 119-140), Andrew Jenks, “Model City USA: The Environmental Cost of Victory in World War II and the Cold War” (Environmental History 2007, 12: 552-77), and Matthew Gandy, “Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai” (Environment and Planning A 2008, 40: 108 – 130).

The 2008 Envirotech Prize submissions show how illuminating including both technology and the environment in our historical stories can be. We hope scholars will continue to explore this fruitful area and make our award-winner in 2010 even more difficult to select.

If the work is a PhD thesis, it should have been accepted by your university in 2007 or 2008; if it is a published work, the year of publication should be 2007 or 2008. The submission should be accompanied by a CV and, if applicable, a list of publications. Applicants are free to add references or reviews on the work submitted.

ICOHTEC, founded in Paris in 1968, is a Scientific Section within the Division of the History of Science and Technology of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST). It is a leading international organisation in the history of technology and has its membership base mainly in Europe, but also in the Americas, East Asia, India and Australia. Research activities, in which ICOHTEC members co-operate, are on a comparative national basis, stressing aspects of co-operation between various nations, regions or institutions.

ICOHTEC holds annual symposia and venues are spread round the world. Next year’s meeting “Ideas and Instruments in Social Context” will take place in Budapest, Hungary, as part of the 23rd International Congress of History of Science and Technology, 26-31 July 2009. ICON is the organisation’s journal containing scholarly articles. Current issues are reported in the Newsletter, which also contains country reports on the history of technology and bibliographical surveys. Further information is available at the homepage: http://www.icohtec.org/

For more information, please, contact Timo Myllyntaus, ICOHTEC Secretary General, timmyl@utu.fi.