About the Center of Excellence for Anthropocene History
The Center of Excellence for Anthropocene History is a multi-disciplinary, research-focused center. We aim to build a novel, integrated approach to the past, present and future of the cumulative anthropogenic environmental transformation of the planet. We contend that modern history is an essential sense-making and navigational tool for the understanding of our contemporary world.
Building on advances in Earth System and Anthropocene science, multiple strands of work in history (of, especially, environment, climate, energy, media, science, technology, infrastructures), and the neighbouring integrative field of Environmental Humanities, the Center systematically works to mend the longstanding separation between Earth history and human history. A seperation that the Anthropocene proves to be obsolete.
Our specific aims include, first and foremost, developing a new interdisciplinary field of research with the intention to break new ground in the humanities and the social sciences. We also aim to make historical research more relevant, both to the sciences and for contemporary challenges, and vice versa.
The Center for Anthropocene History undertakes a novel approach to modern and contemporary history, aiming to reform historical research and develop a new understanding of ‘human-and-Earth-history’ by using the notion of the Anthropocene as both study object and mode of study. In other words, we study the history of human-earth change known as the Anthropocene while also taking on the methodological and theoretical challenges this implies in reforming the foundations of modern historiography.
We perceive the Anthropocene not just as a geochronological epoch, but as a state of the world where the human and the natural intersect so profoundly that the writing of history – part of the humanities and the social sciences – is changing towards the natural and the material. To do this, we will build on the extensive range of histories developed in our existing research environment, all of which are arguably already Anthropocene histories. By drawing them together under the official name of Anthropocene History, we are building a novel field from these independent and developing research topics in a bottom-up way, and are giving them new relevance and forms for collaboration and interaction.