Month: March 2022

Wow! Turning in an assignment that I’ve worked on for a while is always slightly unnerving – is it really done? Have I looked at the page so many times that I didn’t notice a formatting mistake? Did I accidentally

From my short essay writing and post-project proposal reflection I have been deliberating the direction of my final project. A lack of direction has been my biggest issue, so I have been spending some time to figure out where I

Last week’s class on the non-human was extremely interesting. For me, it helped clear up some ideas I have for my long essay, and allowed me to adapt what I was saying in my short essay. It showed me that

‘International Law’ (IL) is useless. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Whether sitting around with all the armchair generals in IR, reading ‘realist’ literature or indulging in the latest journalistic diatribe against IL penned by some jumped up American isolationist,

With the presentation a week or so away, I am enjoying continuing my research for my project. What is currently on my mind is how 10 minutes to present really is not that much time. From my research so far,

“Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)”. So goes the title of one of the many articles I am reading in my attempt to better understand Rapanui and its people. This one

I have been engaging with more theoretical discourses regarding the construct of ‘the nation’ along with its main counterparts, nationalism and national identity. The fluidity of the term across disciplines, particularly international relations, has proven to be a bit difficult

There is a clear link between non-human and transnational history as looking at the non-human cuts across many of the categories which humans impose, such as the nation which form the basis for narrow studies of history. There is a

I took John Clarke’s History of Environmentalism module last year. We read a few interesting pieces that I found to be relevant to this week in Transnational history. Sophie made an interesting point regarding how easy it is to forget

This week’s readings were extremely interesting and surprising to me in a few ways. In terms of the draft article, I was surprised that I had never heard of Laki considering last year, while on a study abroad placement in

I find this week’s topic and readings extremely interesting because of the questions it raises about the practice of doing history and what counts as history. While I had heard of environmental history, and fondly remember reading (I think) some

The environment and climate change are issues that are gaining increasing attention and urgency in the climate of today’s world. While there has been rising historical works on the human impact on the environment since the 1960s and 1970s, less

It has been about a week since I last terrorised (read bored) my flatmates with talk of a historical volcano. The last culprit was the 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora, recently connected to the ‘year without a summer’ phenomena by

Unconventional times call for unconventional history, so here we are. This week’s readings featured an ever-fascinating combination of environmental histories, discussions on the Capitalocene, and much volcano talk. As someone who loves intertwined histories and new perspectives, I was intrigued

Not having been based in the nation state intellectual history it is perhaps less obvious immediately what the addition of the ‘global’ aspect adds. However, intellectual history has predominantly focussed on western thought and often only connected it to the