What is the Climate History Network?
The Climate History Network (CHN) is an organization of scholars who reconstruct past climate changes and, often, identify how those changes affected human history. The CHN connects academics in many disciplines, from many countries. We encourage more collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching and research in climate history. We offer contacts and resources for professors, teachers, students, and interested lay people.
The CHN grew out of discussions on the H-Environment network in 2010. We currently have more than 150 members. We are part of the International Congress of Environmental History Organizations, and we hold regular meetings at the annual conferences of the American Society for Environmental History. We also host annual climate history workshops at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. We are planning a major conference dedicated to past relationships between climate change and conflict.
Our programs are made possible through financial support provided by Georgetown University and the Georgetown Environment Initiative. Our listserv is hosted by Ohio State University. We do not have any political affiliation. Membership is free.
Why do we need a Climate History Network?
Anthropogenic global warming has increased public and scholarly interest in past climates. It has led researchers to create ever more detailed and accurate reconstructions of past climate changes. These reconstructions, in turn, allow other academics to find detailed connections between climate changes and human history. Taken together, this work provides fresh perspectives for our understanding of future climate changes and human responses.
Although climate reconstructions have a long history in the natural sciences, climate history is only now entering the mainstream of humanistic disciplines, such as history. It has recently entered into political discussions on climate change that aim at contextualizing present and future warming. In light of these developments within and beyond academia, many climate historians decided that they needed their own organization. This network grew out of those ambitions.
How to navigate this website
The "news" page features the news we consider to be most relevant to scholars of climate history. Most of this news consists of publication information, conference reports, calls for papers, updates, and other announcements. Pressing news updates and ideas are broadcast through our listserv. Our social media pages highlight additional news relevant to climate changes past, present, and future. Our "events" page contains announcements about meetings, workshops, and conferences hosted by the CHN.
Other pages offer extensive resources for teaching and research into climate history. Our "databases" page lists digital resources that can support research projects in climate history. Our teaching page includes climate history syllabi, and a set of interviews about teaching the environmental history of climate change. Our bibliography page links to an extensive, searchable climate history bibliography, hosted on Zotero. Our "links" page lists related networks and websites. Click on our "podcast" header to access the iTunes page for the Climate History Podcast, hosted by Dr. Dagomar Degroot. Our "members" page gives the email addresses, institutional affiliations, and research keywords of our international, multidisciplinary members. Finally, our "contact" page lets you send a message to our team. It includes a short form that you can fill out to become a member.
Our online presence is at the heart of everything we do, and we are always looking for more content. If you're interested in climate history, please consider volunteering.
Our team
Dagomar Degroot is associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) was named by the Financial Times as one of the top ten history books of 2018. His second book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of the Solar System, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking. His articles have appeared in scientific and historical journals from Nature to Environmental History, and he publishes regularly in popular publications such as Aeon and the Washington Post. He is the founder and director of the popular website HistoricalClimatology.com; the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network, and the founder and co-host of the podcast Climate History.
Sam White is professor in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has been professor of environmental history at Ohio State University and visiting fellow at the University of Michigan, Aix-Marseille University, and the University of Bern. His research focuses on how we can use natural and human records to reconstruct past climates and extreme weather and how societies coped with them. He is author of the books The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and a A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) and various chapters and articles on world history, and on climate, disease, and animals in history. Prof. White is also lead editor of the Palgrave Handbook to Climate History, co-founder and website administrator of the Climate History Network, and steering committee member of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Society (CRIAS) working group.
Nicholas Cunigan is the newsletter editor of the CHN. He is an adjunct professor of history at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI. There he teaches a broad range of classes on topics including environmental history, big history, and indigenous peoples history. His broad research interests lie at the intersection of environmental, indigenous peoples, and the Dutch Golden Age. He's currently working on a manuscript based on his dissertation "Weathering Extremes: Climate, Colonialism, and Indigeous Resistance in the Dutch Atlantic. His next project, Beans of Unrest: An Environmental History of Dutch Coffee Cultures, examines the impact of climate change and variability on Dutch coffee plantations in the East and West Indies from the 1690s to the end of the nineteenth century. Outside of academia, he is an aspiring triathlete and wood worker.
Robert Christensen is the news editor of the CHN. He is a doctoral student in the environmental history program at Georgetown University. Rob Christensen is a PhD student in history at Georgetown University. His research focuses on climate change and indigenous people in the Patagonian steppe during the Little Ice Age. In the moments between research and writing, he enjoys getting outdoors with his wife and their two dogs, and a good game of basketball.
Katrin Kleemann is the social media editor of the CHN and HistoricalClimatology.com. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the history department at the University of Freiburg in Germany and Barbara S. Mosbacher fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, USA. In July 2020, Katrin graduated from the doctoral program “Environment and Society” at the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich in Germany with a major in history and a minor in geology. Her doctoral project investigated the Icelandic Laki fissure eruption of 1783. She analyzed its impacts on the northern hemisphere and how the contemporaries perceived, explained, and coped with the phenomena caused by the eruption. Her findings will be published with De Gruyter’s “Historical Catastrophe Studies” series. During her doctoral degree, Katrin received a fellowship from the Andrea von Braun Foundation, which supports interdisciplinary research.