The third annual SIES lecture was delivered by Sunil Amirth (Yale) on April 8, 2026. His talk, "The Air as Archive," explored how technology has shaped environmental perception and knowledge by considering the air as an archive. How have the capacity for aerial vision, on the one hand, and the technologies of aerial measurement, on the other, made possible defining insights into the human condition on a changing Earth? What kinds of history does the air contain, and what does it mean to think of the air as an archive?  

Sunil Amrith offered a masterclass, "Scale in Environmental History." The course gave graduate students an opportunity to explore the challenge of scale in environmental history. and answer questions like: What are the stakes in deciding on what scale to write—from the microscopic to the planetary? What techniques can we use as writers to move across scales? What can we learn from other media, including film? How does the choice of scale shape the form of the work, or vice versa?

A highly interactive course, participants brought with them source material they were working with on their own projects and read a handful of assigned readings, which Dr. Amrith used to facilitate conversation about writing across scales. 

2025-2026: Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History; Director, Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; Vice Provost for International Affairs at Yale University. Amrith’s research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia, and has expanded to encompass global environmental history. He has published in the fields of environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. His new book is The Burning Earth, an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South (W.W. Norton and Penguin UK). It was named a 2024 “essential read” by The New Yorker, a “book we love” 2024 by NPR, and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson prize. It is being translated into ten languages.

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2024-2025: Bathsheba Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her work focuses on the environmental history of the Russian and North American Arctic and she is author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, published by W. W. Norton (2019). Prof. Demuth completed her PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a project titled The Long Water: A Biography of the Yukon River that "examines how legal ideas—from where law originates to private property, rights to hunt or fish, and Indigenous land claims—and the ecology of the Yukon River mingled and changed each other over the past 200 years."

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2023-2024: Jo Guldi is Professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory University and a historian of capitalism. Her books include The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History, The Long Land war: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, The History Manifesto, and The Road to Power. She completed her PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley and later held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Chicago and the Harvard Society of Fellows. Prof. Guldi was also previously Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown, and Full Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.

The Shapiro Initiative for Environment and Society is happy to offer fellowship support for pre-ABD students in the Social Science Division working on topics with a strong connection to environmental history. We can offer funds for travel between $500 and $2,500. The deadline for Spring 2026 will be Monday, May 18th at 5pm. To be considered for funding, please submit an application, which includes submission of a 500-word proposal with a provisional budget along with a recent CV. All fields are required.

Applications are due May 18 2026 at 5pm. 

Upon completion of the trip, recipients will be asked to provide a short report about their findings.

The 2025-2026 workshop was not held, but we anticipate holding one in April 2027 for the 2026-2027 academic year.