What is Global Environmental History?

Environmental history examines the complex and changing web of relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Global environmental history addresses both the globe and the planet. This means it examines the human-created construction of global networks of ideas, institutions, goods, and infrastructure, as well as the planet as an ecosystem in which plants, animals, humans, and other organisms, together with weather and landscape formations, create and shape life. Global environmental history thinks and conducts research in an interdisciplinary manner. The soil in its composition or the landscape in its aesthetics are just as much our archive as personal documents, court records, or media products.

Research and teaching priorities in Augsburg’s Global Environmental History program focus on the thematic areas of water, walking, infrastructure, animals, economy, and power and politics.

What are Environmental Humanities?

Awareness of the ecological crisis has found its way into various disciplines within the social sciences and humanities—from history and philosophy to anthropology and literary studies—and has transformed and expanded their approaches and methods. At the heart of this lies a deeper reflection on concepts of nature, the relationships between nature and culture, and the need to bring questions of responsibility and (more-than-human) environmental justice to the forefront. In doing so, the Environmental Humanities have not become a uniform discipline but thrive on the multifaceted perspectives of various academic disciplines, as well as the arts.

Global environmental history at the University of Augsburg is part of this lively dialogue with the inter- and transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities, whether within the Environmental Humanities network at the WZU, at the IDK Um(welt)denken, or beyond.