The EHW Organising Collective is made up of previous event organisers, and exists to provide support to future Environmental History Workshop organisers.
Dr Jennifer Keating
Jennifer is a historian of late imperial and early Soviet Russia, working on the mechanisms of imperial expansion and collapse. Her research interests lie in the social and environmental history of settler societies at the edges of the empire – regions where land and resources very often acquired charged significance for both locals and the Russian state. She is currently a Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, where, alongside completing a book manuscript on political ecologies of empire in tsarist Central Asia, she is working on a new project that examines environmental violence during the Russian civil war period. Jennifer co-organised the 2018 EHW.
Dr John Morgan
John is an environmental and social historian of early modern Britain. He works on the history of flooding and water management, and is part of an AHRC project on the history of Internal Drainage Boards. His previous work has focussed on urban fires in the seventeenth century and the Elizabethan religious settlement. John is also interested in the history of pigeons in the early modern Atlantic world. He is lecturer in early modern history at the University of Bristol.
Dr Elly Robson
Elly Robson is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2016-17, she was the Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. Her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge, exmained the social, environmental, and intellectual conflict in the seventeenth-century fens. Elly is also an Editorial Fellow at History Workshop Online, an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, and a Fellow of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. Elly co-organised the 2018 EHW.
Dr Leona Skelton
Leona Skelton is an environmental historian of water infrastructure, rivers and reservoirs in Britain between 1500 and the present. After completing a PhD at Durham in 2012 on sanitation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Edinburgh and York, published by Routledge in 2016 as Sanitation in Urban Britain, she completed two Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded post-doctoral research projects at the universities of York and Bristol on the environmental history of Kielder Reservoir and the River Tyne respectively. Between 2015 and 2016, she worked as a Research Assistant on an interdisciplinary water research project with civil engineers and social scientists at Sheffield University before joining Northumbria University in 2016 as Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Humanities. She recently published her second monograph with White Horse Press, Tyne after Tyne, and is currently working on two research projects: 1) the environmental history of northern English brewing between 1600 and 1830 and 2) as Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded project, ‘Past Floods Matter‘ with the Environment Agency and other partners in Cumbria. Leona co-organised the 2018 EHW.
Dr James Bowen
James is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University working on a Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Thinking forward through the past: linking science, social science and the humanities to inform the sustainable reduction of endemic disease in British livestock farming’. James completed a BA in History at Lancaster University including an Erasmus exchange at the University of Copenhagen, before pursuing an MA in English Local History at the University of Leicester. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Angus J.L. Winchester at Lancaster, examined the governance and management of common land in Shropshire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. He has published widely in a variety of outlets including History & Policy, the Journal of Historical Geography, and Rural History. James co-organised the 2018 EHW.
Dr Guillemette Crouzet
Dr Guillemette Crouzet is an historian of the British empire, the Middle East and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her prize-winning first book, Genèses du Moyen-Orient. Le Golfe Persique à l’âge des impérialismes, was published in 2015. Her current research focuses on the role played by oil in British imperialism in the Middle East in the decades around 1900, and on the social, political and environmental consequences this had in the region. She has held fellowships and teaching positions at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris-Sorbonne, the European University Institute in Florence and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow in the History Department at Warwick University, where she was previously Newton/British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Guillemette co-organised the 2019 EHW.
Dr Jane Rowling
Dr Jane Rowling is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate to the Past Floods Matter project, and is based at the University of Hull. Her background is in agricultural, local, and oral history. She trained at the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, and produced a thesis on farming community and identity in Lower Wharfedale, Yorkshire, in the period 1914-1951, which used both oral history and archive sources to investigate the community, its work and its relationship with the landscape. Jane co-organised the 2019 EHW.
Dr Rebecca Wright
Dr Rebecca Wright is a cultural historian of energy, with a focus on twentieth-century American history. Her current work examines the intersecting histories of energy and health. She is a Senior Lecturer in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow in Future Health at the University of York, a Research Fellow in Mass Observation Studies at the University of Sussex and a Research Fellow on the AHRC Collaborative Project ‘Material Cultures of Energy’ at Birkbeck College. She is currently finishing a monograph, Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press). Rebecca co-organised the 2019 EHW.
Dr Chris Pearson
After working at the University of Bristol and the University of Warwick, I joined the University of Liverpool in September 2012. My research interests lie predominantly in environmental and cultural history. They focus on modern French history, the environmental history of war and animal history. My doctoral research and subsequent monograph form the first environmental history of Vichy France and outline the material and cultural importance of nature during the ‘dark years’ and their aftermath. This led to postdoctoral work on French and transnational militarized landscapes and my second monograph on the environmental history of war and militarization in France from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. My current project ‘Dogopolis: Dogs, Humans, and the Making of Modern Cities’ explores the role and presence of dogs as workers, pets, pests, and beyond in nineteenth and twentieth century London, New York and Paris.
Dr Shirley Ye
I am a global historian of modern China, with teaching and research interests that span from early times to the present. My book manuscript entitled Engineering the Environment: The Internationalisation of Water Control in Modern China looks at the role global engineers, diplomats, and capital played in shaping late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century hydraulic management in China. The case studies in the book centre around the rivers leading to the treaty ports, the Grand Canal, a tributary of the Yellow River in Shaanxi, and tertiary education in the Republican period. My work has been supported by the Fulbright IIE, Fulbright DDRA, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China, and the British Academy. I am based at the University of Birmingham
Dr Alice Harvey-Fishenden
Alice Harvey-Fishenden is an interdisciplinary researcher, currently based in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool with experience of working across a variety of disciplines, including English, History, Archaeology, Physical and Human Geography. Her PhD research focused on developing a better understanding of the societal impacts of droughts in the past, and how archive documents can be used to learn more about droughts and other extreme weather conditions.
Dr Dominic Berry
Dominic Berry is Research Fellow on the Narrative Science project, a history and philosophy of science project based at the LSE: https://www.narrative-science.org/ He has a background in the history of agriculture and agricultural science, which in recent years has continued to develop towards the history of biological engineering. In 2019 he won a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award which supported a two-day workshop hosting scholars whose work addresses intersections of the history of environment, technology, and theories of narrative. Videos of many of the presentations from that workshop can now be viewed here: https://www.narrative-science.org/videos-from-narrative-science-in-techno-environments-workshop.html
Environmental History Workshop 