RUCHE – Réseau universitaire de chercheur.es en histoire environnementale (Web)

Time: 11.-12.06.2026
Venue: Aix-en-Provence Cedex 2, France
Proposals by: 15.12.2025

Both environmental history and women’s history, along with gender history later on, were institutionalised in the United States in the early 1970s. Paradoxically, however, there has been little dialogue between these two fields until recently, as has been pointed out more generally with regard to environmental history and social history (Mosley 2006). Yet these two fields of historical scholarship have shared a common goal from the outset: giving a voice and agency to those forgotten by official history. Their aim was to take on new subjects of study (women, non-humans) or, more ambitiously, to re-interpret the past in terms of gender power relations or environmental issues (Fressoz et al. 2014; Quenet 2014; Mathis 2018). Against the backdrop of struggles for civil rights and gender equality, as well as the development of environmental movements, a sometimes militant academic commitment was another feature these two currents had in common. Some 30 years later, environmental historians sought to provide their field with a theoretical framework to demonstrate its centrality to history as a discipline and to the social sciences more broadly. Gender history then provided a template for those who wanted to treat the environment as a category of analysis comparable to race, class and gender in order to uncover power relations and asymmetries (Scott 1986; Steinberg 2002; Stroud 2003; Quenet 2014).
However, the intersection between gender history and environmental history has remained relatively limited to date, particularly outside the English-speaking world and beyond Indian historiography, despite repeated calls to integrate gender perspectives into the conceptual apparatus of environmental history (Guha 1989, 2000; Merchant 1990; Leach and Green 1997; Scharff 2003; Unger 2014; Holmes and Morgan 2021; Morgan and Cook 2021). Work in this area over the past 20 years has mainly focused on North America, reflecting the dual American tradition in these two fields of history, and on India, where the convergence of social and environmental issues has been central to subaltern studies. This research has largely prioritised the contemporary era. Furthermore, in the English-speaking world, a significant proportion of these studies have centred on the experiences and concerns of the Western male elite in line with the specificities of US history (e.g. the conquest of the American West, masculinity and wilderness) … read more and source … (Web).