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Environmental Humanities Seminar With Tobias Hrynick

Plimpton Room (Barker 133)

Tobias Hrynick is an environmental and digital historian, who conducted his PhD. training in medieval history at Fordham University. Hrynick specializes in the institutional responses of pre-modern local governments to environmental stress. His previous work has engaged with conflict over hydraulic resources in the thirteenth-century Kingdom of Jerusalem, and with the religious and political rhetoric of landscapes in medieval maps. Hrynick’s current project examines the social responses of medieval wetland communities to successive climate-linked crises, associated with the end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Agricultural communities constructed on drained coastal wetlands were some of the densest and most productive rural landscapes in medieval Europe, but their inherent flood-risk and reliance on complex and labor-intensive drainage infrastructure left them acutely vulnerable to the rise in winter storm flooding, and the labor shortage and economic disruptions following the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death. Both in England and in the Low Countries, radical forms of local government were invented to cope with the rising crisis. Hrynick is currently composing a monograph on one particularly distinctive governmental response, in Romney Marsh, Kent, which eventually became the model for wetland drainage throughout England and its empire into the twentieth century.

Environmental Humanities Seminar with Rebecca Hogue

Plimpton Room (Barker 133)

Rebecca H. Hogue (she/they) grew up on the island of Oʻahu and writes about empire, militarization, and the environment in the Pacific Islands and Oceania. Her current book project, Nuclear Archipelagos, examines Indigenous women’s anti-nuclear arts and literatures in the Pacific. Her work can be found in The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Amerasia, Critical Ethnic Studies, International Affairs, and elsewhere. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harvard University Asia Center, and the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities. She holds a PhD in English with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis and has taught at UC Davis, Brown University, and in the History & Literature concentration at Harvard. In 2024, she will join the faculty at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English.