I have posted a paper currently in progress on history teaching and ‘education for sustainable development at the History Working Papers Project website. This is a fantastic initiative that has created a version of the open peer review sites being experimented with in the sciences. You can read the paper and provide comment paragraph by paragraph, and I cam respond to comments. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on this.

We’re going to organize a working papers series from autumn of this coming academic year. This will involve short talks and informal discussion on precirculated papers. If you would like to share some of your work then email Tim Cooper with a proposed title.

We will most likely try to meet on a monthly basis. If you have preferences regarding timings, etc, then let me know.

Mark Levene’s most recent publication ‘Climate Blues: of How Awareness of the Human End might re-intsil Ethical Purpose to the Writing of History’ is now out in the journal Environmental Humanities. Levene is co-ordinator of the Rescue!History group, who run a blog and organise events that bring historians and public together to generate social and political responses to anthropogenic climate change.

The Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities (CEAH) creates opportunities for shared investigation of the complex relationship between the environment and the human imagination.

The Centre nurtures existing research and provides support for collaborations within and beyond the arts and humanities, and with external organisations and international partners. Our work contributes to contemporary thinking about environment and sustainability by historicising and contextualising the terms of environmental debate and ecological citizenship. This work is crucial in an era of urgent environmental problems, where an awareness of experiences and perspectives in the historical past has the potential to shape present understanding and influence political discourse. The work of the Centre promotes research and discussion concerning historical and cultural narratives of ‘nature’ and natural resources, with particular attention to the way forms of artistic and cultural representation — including literary texts, maps, images, crafts and film — generate and perpetuate popular ideas and beliefs about nature and the environment.

Recent CEAH activities include involvement in the 2012 Creative Coast Forum (in partnership with the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site), collaborative meetings with faculty at the University of Utah regarding their Environmental Humanities graduate programme, and participation in several AHRC research networks (including one on Early Modern Discourses of Environmental Change and Sustainability).

In April 2013 the CEAH hosted a conference on ‘Medieval Perceptions of Landscape: How did people in Medieval Cornwall perceive their environment?’ This was a joint meeting organised by the Landscape Research Group (LRG), the Medieval Settlement Research Group (MSRG) and the CEAH.

The Centre also publishes a book series, in partnership with Uniformbooks. The titles in the series are intellectually accessible and conceptually provocative, intended to share cutting-edge research in environmental humanities research with a wide audience of academics, practitioners and interested publics. The first publication in the series, Anticipatory History, considers how the stories we tell about ecological and landscape histories can help shape our perceptions of plausible environmental futures.

Welcome to the CEAH blog! A place where we can share our thoughts and ideas on the environmental arts and humanities and to stay in touch about upcoming events and all important meetings in the pub. A good place to start (once marking is out of the way) might be for each of us to say a few words about the meaning, but also issues and problems, of environmental humanities from our own disciplinary and research perspectives. The site is only available to us as a group and is very much intended to be a creative space for exploring ideas and making cross-disciplinary connections.   More from me again soon…. Nicola