Course description
This PhD course offers practical learning and hands-on experience working with environmental temporalities in a historical context. ‘Environmental temporalities’ refers to the complex entanglements between environments and time. Putting them under a historical lens means to probe the many ways environments and temporalities have related to and shaped each other across time.
We can find entanglements between environments and time embedded in a wide range of historical sources, from medieval chronicles recording natural disasters as apocalyptic signs to enlightened stage theories judging the progress of civilization based on the use of the land and in contemporary discourses concerning the climate crisis. There are many sources, but getting into them can be hard. Both ‘environment’ and ‘temporality’ are theory-laden, heavily debated concepts. For early career scholars wanting to work with them, it is easy to get stuck in theoretical reflections and literature reviews instead of putting them to actual analytical use on the source material.
The course focuses on how you can approach environmental temporalities in practice, working with different kinds of sources, analytical strategies, and concepts. The speakers, Ada Arendt (University of Oslo) and Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen), will present examples from their research to show how one can anchor theoretical considerations in concrete analytical practice working with environmental temporalities.
The course is primarily aimed at PhD students working within the various fields of history. Students working on environmental temporalities in related fields like literature, religious studies, and anthropology are also welcome.
Speakers
- Ada Arendt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, where she co-heads the interdisciplinary research group KLIMER: Climate, environment and energy. She researches early modern environmental ethics of care drawing on insights from historical anthropology, microhistory, and environmental history. Her work is archive-driven and combines close readings of popular and practical sources – from household encyclopedias to agronomical treatises and astrological almanacs – with grand theoretical themes of shifting temporal regimes and modes of rationality. In 2019, she published her first book Archeologia zatroskania. Staropolskie kalendarze w działaniu [Archaeology of Care. Early Modern Almanacs in Action] reviewing polish almanac annotations in light of a broader reflection on the notions of time, rationality, production of memory and techniques of the self.
- Kyrre Kverndokk is a professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen. His research covers diverse topics within folkloristics, cultural history, and cultural studies, including memory studies, the reception of natural disasters from a historical perspective, and climate change temporalities. Through various research projects, Kverndokk has explored the cultural history of natural disasters, climate change temporalities, and imaginaries of disastrous futures. His project on the reception of natural disasters from a historical perspective (funded by FRIHUM and SAMKUL, NFR 2010-2014) led to the publication of the book Naturkatastrofer - en kulturhistorie (2016). Kverndokk was the PI of the research project The future is now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses (KLIMAFORSK, NFR) from 2017-2019. He is currently the PI of the follow-up project Gardening the Globe: Historicizing the Anthropocene through the production of socio-nature in Scandinavia, 1750-2020 (2021-2025, SAMKUL, NFR).
Preparations
- Reading: The course has a mandatory curriculum (c. 200 pages) which participants are expected to read before the workshop. The curriculum will be curated by the speakers, reflecting theories, concepts, and perspectives related to environmental temporalities. The reading list will be sent out to the participants before the summer.
- Writing: The participants are further required to submit a c. 3-page essay describing their source material and main analytical concepts and exemplifying how they use them in their research. These will form the basis of the workshop’s discussions. The submission deadline is a week before the course on 18th of September 2025.
- Commenting: Additionally, the participants are required to read and prepare questions and comments on each other's essays.
- Revising: After the course, participants will need to revise their essays with reflections on their takeaways from the course. The deadline for the revised essay is November 1, 2025.
Reading list
Arteaga, Alex and Nikolaus Gansterer (2025). Contingent Agencies: Inquiring Into the Emergence of Atmospheres. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Verlag. https://phaidra.bibliothek.uni-ak.ac.at/detail/o:74284
Read the following chapters:
Nikolaus Gansterer, “A Contingent Preface,” pp. 17-25 (Read odd pages only).
Tim Ingold, “Landscape, Atmosphere, and the Weather World,” pp. 89-101.
Gerhard Dirmoser, “Diagramming Theories of Atmosphere,” pp. 249-259.
Bastian, Michelle, and Rowan Bayliss Hawitt (2023). “Multi-Species, Ecological and Climate Change Temporalities: Opening a Dialogue with Phenology.” Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space (Print) 6 (2): 1074–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111784.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009). “The climate of history. Four theses”. Critical Inquiry, 2, pp. 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640
Holm, Isak Winkel (2021). “The prophetic tone in True Detective: sensing the time of the future climate disaster.” In Kyrre Kverndokk, Marit Ruge Bjærke and Anne Eriksen (eds.) Climate change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourse. Routledge, pp. 89-105. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003037415
Kverndokk, Kyrre, and Anne Eriksen (2021). “Climate Change Temporalities: Narratives, Genres, and Tropes.” In Kyrre Kverndokk, Marit Ruge Bjærke and Anne Eriksen (eds.) Climate change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourse. Routledge, pp. 89-105. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003037415
In class
The course is conducted as a one-day workshop centered around a series of collective readings. In the morning, the speakers will each give a ‘guided reading’ exemplifying and reflecting on how they approach the entanglements of environments and time in their materials. After lunch, we move on to the participants’ essays, which we will discuss together as a group. The speakers will chair the discussions.
The course runs from 09.00 to 17.00. Coffee and lunch will be served along the way. We will conclude the day with a common dinner for speakers and participants in town.
The course will be conducted in English, and we encourage PhD-students from other institutions and countries to sign up.
Course credits
2 ECTS. These are earned by reading the assigned literature (c. 200 pages), writing the essay (c. 3 pages), reading the other participants’ essays, participating in the course itself, and revising the essay afterward.
Registration
- To register, send an e-mail to the course organizers Arendse Wenzel Måge and Taran Palmstrøm Fenn.
- The registration should include 1) details of your institutional affiliation, doctoral program, and progression and 2) a brief description of your project and how it would benefit from this course.
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We review registrations on a rolling basis and use the abovementioned descriptions to allocate the spots. Registration closes on June 15, 2025.