Author: Bernhard Struck

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 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

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” is the famous question posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her article on how historians’ study and ultimately engage in the nature of Subaltern peoples. In this, Spivak argues that no the historian cannot access the past

This week’s subject, Postcolonial Approaches and Global Intellectual History, came at perfect timing for my essay research. During the unconference last weekend, I decided to focus on theory and intellectual history that will help frame my later project. My project

Montreal mayor, John Dradeau, famously stated that “the Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby”. Despite an original estimate that the games would cost the city C$120m, Montreal was left with a bill

Chernobyl is situated in Ukraine, at the fringe of Eastern Europe. There are so many explorations of the affect of Chernobyl in Soviet and post-Soviet states, and on Western Europe, which is what led me to explore this topic on

In the spirit of week 8’s seminar on Global Intellectual History I have decided to address some of the things I have been thinking through in relation to the upcoming essay deadline. I will be writing on Global Legal History,