FEATURED Publications

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2017
EDITED BY JASON M. KELLY, PHILIP SCARPINO, HELEN BERRY, JAMES SYVITSKI, MICHEL MEYBECK

This exciting volume presents the research of the Rivers of the Anthropocene Network , an international collaborative group of scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, policy makers, and community organizers working to produce innovative transdisciplinary research on global freshwater systems. Featuring contributions from authors in a rich diversity of disciplines—from toxicology to archaeology to philosophy—this book is an excellent resource for students and scholars studying both freshwater systems and the Anthropocene. 

American Historical Review, August 2020

In the appendix to the French edition of his Elements of Geology in 1839, the geologist Charles Lyell introduced a new word into the scientific lexicon: “Pleistocene.” He described it as a fusion of the Greek words “pleiston” (πλεῖστος) and “kainos” (καινός)—a neologism meant to designate the most recent geological epoch. As he described it, the Pleistocene was the epoch “which has elapsed since the earth has been tenanted by man” (Lyell, Principles of Geology [1833], 3:52). Over the course of the 1830s, Lyell and his compatriot William Whewell introduced a number of new designations into the geological lexicon: the Eocene (“dawn of the new”), the Miocene (less recent), and the Pliocene (more recent).

American Historical Review, April 2017

This essay examines the limits and potentials of digital history, especially as it relates to the construction of archives and digital datasets. Through a critical reading of the sources used to create the Grand Tour Project—part of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford University—it shows the ways in which datasets can both hide and embody hierarchies of power. This piece offers suggestions for alternative readings of the Grand Tour narrative. It ends by summarizing a series of challenges faced by historians as they contemplate best practices for creating and maintaining digital datasets in the twenty-first century.

Journal of British Studies, July 2018
Chris Otter, Alison Bashford, John L. Brooke, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Jason M. Kelly 

The transition into the Anthropocene is unquestionably the deepest and most profound event in recent history. While the term is only a couple of decades old, it has become hard to imagine conceptualizing the impact of human beings on the earth—the collision of human history and planetary geology—without it. But how should scholars working on British culture and history respond to the conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene? How are we supposed to combine two scales of analysis—the geological and the historical? To get our bearings, we assembled ourselves as a roundtable of scholars with significant interest in these debates.