HistoryLab goes to ASEH Conference in Chicago

Winds of Change: Global Connections across Space, Time, and Nature
Dates: March 29 – April 2, 2017
Location: Drake Hotel, downtown Chicago (Magnificent Mile)
Host: University of Illinois-Chicago

Join us in Chicago as we celebrate 40 years of environmental history
ASEH’s 2017 conference will include many special events commemorating our 40th anniversary, including sessions on the state of the field, publishing trends, future directions for environmental history, and more.

Mobilities, Limitations and Adaptations of the Mediterranean Mountains

Sat, April 1, 1:30 to 3:00pm, The Drake Hotel, Michigan

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel will consider the relationship of mobility and environmental limitation/adaptation across a range of mountain environments of the Mediterranean region. Foundational works of Mediterranean environmental history such as Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World and J.R. McNeill’s Mountains of the Mediterranean World have made mountain ranges central to the landscape and natural-historical evolution of the Mediterranean basin as a whole. So too have they demonstrated the necessity of a transnational and comparative approach to mountain environments, particularly in a Mediterranean region that has operated as an “ecological unit” (McNeill) across considerable expanses of space and time. Recent reawakening of interest in global mountain environments and issues invites a return to the Mediterranean as a venerable region of global mountain history, and also provides cues for pushing beyond narratives of irreversible decline of “mountain ways of life.” Though differing in locational focus and methodology, the papers of this panel will commonly consider the changing environmental parameters and impacts of mountain mobilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If limitation is a characteristic feature of the mountain environment, so too are mobility and adaptation, and the dynamics between these became ever more important as new agendas of economic conversion and development reached into the mountains in this period. By exploring the “fragility” of the modern mountain environment, this panel will offer broader insight into the global-historical emergence of modern environmental problematics and sensibilities, in the Mediterranean region as elsewhere.

Andrew DENNING, University of Kansas (Chair)

Christopher GRATIEN, Harvard University: Transhumant Temporalities in Ottoman Anatolia

Graham Auman PITTS, Georgetown University: A Precarious Mediterranean Mountain Ecology: Migration, Silk and Famine 1887-1918

Patrick R. YOUNG, University of Massachusettes-Lowell: Transhumance Between Mode de Vie and Mise en Valeur in the Middle Atlas

Federico PAOLINI, Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli: Tourist Mobility and Environmental Adaptation in the Italian Alps