6-8 December 2019, Sydney
This conference aims to produce a fresh and cosmopolitan history of environmental and Earth sciences, analysing the significance of geological time and multiple cosmologies for global modernity. One of the most fascinating elements in a conventional history of geology is its intricate connection to theology; to complex eighteenth and nineteenth-century doctrinal debate on the age of the Earth, its relation to the universal deluge and to Biblical time. Yet the world was never just Christian. New Earth Histories proceeds from that plain fact. The conference proposes to analyse an extensive suite of other ways of knowing modern Earth history: Chinese, South and Southeast Asian, Pacific, Islamic and Indigenous conceptions of the globe, and of Earth’s origins, transformations and make up. Abstracts are invited from historians, geographers and scholars across the social sciences, to historicise the intellectual space between modern geosciences, theology, cosmology and cosmogony from a cosmopolitan view point.
Abstracts due 10 December 2018