• Carmo, Miguel; Direito, Bárbara & Ferreira, José Miguel (ed.) (2026). Our Burning Landscapes: History and Politics of Fire in the Modern World - Environmental History, Volume 32, Issue 4.

«This Special Issue aims to contribute to this emerging historiography with a series of five articles that address the challenges of writing histories of fire in our current time of large and increasingly destructive megafires.[...] The following articles cover different geographical areas and employ a variety of methodologies and approaches to study the history of fire. But they are tied together by a focus on transitions in people-fire-landscape relationships over the past two centuries. »

Editors: Dietlind Hüchtker (University of Vienna), Friedrich Cain (University of Vienna) and Pavla Šimkóvá (Collegium Carolinum)

Deadline for Submissions: 15 November 2026

Call for Papers:
Epistemologies of the Hinterland. The Making of Rural Knowledge in the 20th Century and beyond

Today’s rural environments mirror long historical processes. Especially since the industrial revolution, they can be conceived as the outcome of social, administrative-technological, political, and scientific interventions in a taken-for-granted nature. In our publication project we aim to reconsider these interventions as epistemic complexes that defined rurality along several hierarchical divides that also carved out European modernity: civilization/nature; science/belief, the individual/community; urban/rural; system/habit; measurement/experience; rationality/emotion etc.

Focusing on examples from the area of rurality, we want to search for encounters between bodies of knowledge that have historically been perceived as incommensurable and look at the practices, subjects and objects of knowledge
production. We envision analyses of incommensurability narratives to open perspectives on developments since the early 20th century, but also on the most recent global climate debates and their often very local pinpoints as well as on recent political attempts to re-naturalize complex histories as national cultures.

We want to bring together case studies from different contexts of rurality that offer a new perspective on rural knowledge. At the centre of our attention is on the “how” of knowledge production in all its contradictions, perceived incommensurabilities and inherent power relations. We are focusing mainly on the 20th century, with some sojourns into the 21st century, and on Europe situated within its imperial, colonial, and global context, and the neo-national backlash of re-naturalizing complex histories as national cultures. The significance of science is a central, but not the only aspect.

We are seeking to publish the contributions as a special issue of an international peer-reviewed journal such as Knowledge or Science in Context. Topics can include but are not limited to:

• researching rurality from different disciplinary perspectives
• relations between the researchers and the researched
• historicity of wilderness, nature, and rural spaces
• knowledge production and gender
• hygiene and eugenics in colonial contexts
• knowledge production about precarious agricultural regions (mountains, tundra)
• agricultural modernization
• education in rural areas
• environment, growth and the EU
• global aspects of climate debates and their local contexts
• media and knowledge dissemination

To ensure a concise and coherent publication, we will organize two meetings (online and
in person) to work on questions and concepts, drafts and pre-circulated papers. The
author workshop will take place in Vienna in June 2027.

Preliminary timetable:

15 November 2026: abstract submission deadline

December 2026: online meeting over concept of special issue

June 2027: in-person author workshop in Vienna

Please send your abstract of 500 words max. to dietlind.huechtker(at)univie.ac.at. The deadline for abstracts is the 15th November 2026.

O objetivo desta tese é analisar as cadeias de valor construídas a partir da produção hortofrutícola em Portugal, entre 1850 e 2000. A partir deste enquadramento teórico, o estudo centra-se na identificação do significado histórico das atividades de criação de valor e da sua articulação com os contextos económico global, nacional e regional, combinando os diferentes elementos analíticos num relato sintético e coerente, de matriz interdisciplinar. Desenvolve-se uma leitura global da problemática, articulada com dois estudos de caso - a laranja e a batata - enquanto culturas representativas de dinâmicas diferenciadas de inserção no mercado. Recorre-se ao conceito de cadeia de valor, oriundo da ciência económica, com o duplo objetivo de contribuir para um melhor conhecimento do percurso histórico deste subsector, cuja relevância tem sido secundarizada pela historiografia, e de promover uma interação metodológica e interpretativa entre a História e outras disciplinas. Esta abordagem permite aprofundar a análise das condições de competitividade, organização produtiva e integração nos mercados nacional e internacional. As conclusões evidenciam a existência de trajetórias de modernização desiguais, fortemente condicionadas por fatores organizacionais, tecnológicos e comerciais, bem como o papel ativo do Estado na reconfiguração das cadeias de valor ao longo do tempo. Ao inserir estas transformações numa narrativa histórica de longa duração, a tese contribui para a história económica portuguesa e para os estudos sobre desenvolvimento sustentável, propondo uma visão integrada da evolução do subsector hortofrutícola.

Available at: https://researchportal.ulisboa.pt/files/112077797/scnd990026354743523_td_Leonardo_Pires.pdf

Call for Papers: A World of a Thousand Cuts. Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Organisers: ERC project “Industrial Wood: European Industrialisation as Seen from the Forests (1870–1914) (INWOOD)”

6 - 8 July 2027, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

Deadline for Submissions: 30 November 2026

Call for Papers:
A World of a Thousand Cuts. Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The mainstream historiographies of industrialisation habitually emphasise the novel energy sources and materials that powered this transformative era, such as coal, steel, steam and electricity, implicitly assuming that wood, an important pre-industrial resource, was destined for an inevitable decline. Histories of industrialisation also disproportionately focus on Europe and North America. Stemming from the research vectors of the ERC Starting Grant “Industrial Wood: European Industrialisation as Seen from the Forests (1870-1914)”, this conference aims to rethink the relevance of wood in an unevenly industrialising world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It follows more recent interpretative paths, which draw attention to the material diversity of industrial metabolism, in order to achieve a more complex understanding of the social, economic and environmental histories of industrialisation. The conference also seeks to geographically decentre the research perspective and discover the links between forests and industrialisation in the global context.

Industrialisation, understood as a systemic social and economic transformation underpinned by technological innovations and leading to changes in production regimes, was an uneven and chronologically mis-aligned process within Europe and globally, stretching from the late 18th century far into the 20th century. Consequently, the relationship between industrialisation and forest exploitation varied depending on the national and international politics, markets, law regulations, access to technology, environmental movements, property and labour regimes, imperial dynamics and colonial power. Attentive to these complexities, the organisers have approached industrialisation as an a-synchronous, multi-focal and globally encompassing social and economic process, activated by a confluence of economic impetus and political agenda.

Even if in the course of industrialisation wood has been marginalised as a combustible, it maintained its significance in industrial economies as a construction material. Moreover, innovations in technology and transportation – both the drivers and the outcomes of industrialisation – made forests increasingly accessible for large-scale extraction, thus bringing industrial logging into the furthest reaches of the woods and fundamentally reshaping them economically, socially and ecologically. Recent historical, anthropological and archeological studies, focusing mostly on North America and Europe, show that extractivism, (im)migration and environmental degradation were a part of this process. They also reveal that industrialisation of timber production did not mean a complete break with rural economies, and that the demand for wood as fuel or production material (for paper or packaging, for example) changes depending on the historical moment. Through this conference, we aim to broaden the conversation geographically to include global histories of industrialisation and to answer these questions: how did industrialisation change the world’s forests? What kinds of new relationships, dependencies and hierarchies did the arrival of industrialisation within the forest context instigate with regards to natural environments and the working lives linked to their transformation? How does our understanding of industrialisation change when we cease to read it as a sequence of substitutions and instead view it as a process of persistence, accumulation and re-articulation, wherein old material and energy flows are not erased by new ones but are intricately woven into them, undergoing profound transformation? Ultimately, what does the industrialisation of forests mean? And how do we adjust our research methodologies to answer these questions?

The conference seeks to explore cases, with a double focus on forests and industrialisation, in various political contexts and across different geographies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The papers should relate to but do not have to be limited to the following themes:

• industrialisation and wood consumption
• labour, migration, gender and ethnicity
• empires, colonialism and decolonisation
• industrial wood uses, wood-based businesses and geographies of timber flow
• networks, circulation of ideas and technology
• industrial timberscapes (timber production complexes, workers settlements, infrastructure)
• deindustrialisation and its impact on livelihoods
• environmental effects of industrialisation in forests

Scholars in humanities and social sciences, interested in these topics, are welcome to apply. Ultimately, the conference aims to foster an interdisciplinary confluence between environmental history, social history, economic history, environmental anthropology and related sub-disciplines. We invite contributions from doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers and senior scholars.

ORGANISATION, SUBMISSION AND DEADLINES:
To apply for the conference, please submit a single PDF-file consisting of:

• an abstract of the presentation with a title (max. 500 words)
• name, institutional affiliation, and a list of relevant publications

The applications should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The organisers will cover meals, travel (economy-class flight or train) and accommodation expenses. The conference will be held in person.

Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2026.

The notifications about the participation in the conference will be sent by the end of January 2027.

Successful applicants will be asked to submit the drafts of their papers (6,000 words) by 15 June 2027.

The organisers plan to publish the papers as an edited volume or a special issue of a journal.

Organisers:
Giacomo Bonan, Kateryna Burkush, Vincenzo Colaprice, Csongor Jánosi, Claudio Lorenzini, Silvia Pizzirani