We are excited to announce the following four keynote speakers at the ESEH 2025 Climate Histories Conference:
Heli Huhtamaa, Stefania Barca, Adam Izdebski, and Gaia Giuliani.
All keynotes will be delivered in the Grand Auditorium and will also be streamed to our online participants.
Please see below for more information on the dates, times, and topics of each keynote presentation.
Heli Huhtamaa
Heli Huhtamaa is a climate and environmental historian. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she leads a research project on volcanic impacts on climate, environment and society. Her research interests include climate, environmental and agricultural history as well as the history of pre-industrial Nordic countries.
Stefania Barca
Stefania Barca is Associate Professor in contemporary history and Distinguished Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). In 2021, she was the fourth “Zennstrom” Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. She is the author of Workers of the Earth (Pluto, 2024), Forces of Reproduction (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Enclosing Water (White Horse Press, 2010), winner of the Turku book prize.
Adam Izdebski
Adam Izdebski is an interdisciplinary historian, since 2018, leading an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. Since July 2025, he is professor in human ecology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland, leading the ERC Synergy Grant EUROpest. Adam is also a visiting professor and project leader at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan.
Gaia Giuliani
Gaia Giuliani is an Italian Critical whiteness studies pioneer and an anti-racist feminist activist and scholar. She is a political philosopher and a permanent researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal. She is the author of several monographic books, the latest being Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique (Routledge 2021) and Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).
Tuesday, August 19th 9.00 – 10.30
Climate and Nordic History: Detecting impacts and assessing reactions
Heli Huhtamaa, University of Bern, Switzerland
Throughout history, climate has influenced human activities in the Nordic countries. The Little Ice Age (LIA), which overlapped the late-medieval and early modern periods, is the last distinctive climatic regime before the current period of anthropogenic climate change. Consequently, the LIA can provide interesting analogues to better understand the complexity of climate-society causalities. During the LIA, mean temperatures in northern Europe were markedly cooler than the centuries before and after, and the period is commonly associated with an increased number of weather-induced harvest failures. However, the people of the time were not just passive victims of climate. Instead, the northern people learned how to adapt to these harsh conditions.
This talk provides an overview of the rich source material to explore the histories of climate and society in the Nordic countries, captured in both natural and historical archives. Tree-ring records capture signals of growing season climate variability, while detailed administrative records enable the reconstruction of agricultural and socio-economic impacts. However, examining solely quantitative data can hinder us in distinguishing between coincidence and causation. Consequently, this talk also addresses how climatic events materialized at a grassroots level, revealing some of the key dynamics underlying the human reactions to Little Ice Age climate in Nordic History.
Labour in the Great Acceleration era. Stories of human vulnerability and resistance to earth-system changes
Stefania Barca, University of Santiago de Compostela / CISPAC, Spain
Based on research I have developed along the past two decades, now collected in the book Workers of the Earth. Labour, ecology and reproduction in the age of climate change, this talk will offer an unusual narrative of the Great Acceleration era (1950 to present), centred on how waged and unwaged workers – in industrial, domestic and subsistence labour – as well as their organisations and movements have experienced earth-systems change and how they have acted with respect to it. After a brief discussion of the GA data, I will proceed with a storytelling approach encompassing three case studies representing industrial, domestic and subsistence workers from different world regions. I will conclude with a reflection on the relevance of these stories to climate and earth-system politics in the present.
Thursday, August 21st 14.00 – 15.30
Environmental history and public policy: what works and what does not
Adam Izdebski, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany
Environmental history as a field was born from the desire to study the past in order to change the future. Many founders of the discipline were ecological activists, and this interest is still strongly present in our scholarly community. But what is the current “state of the game” in this respect, especially in the context of the accelerating environmental crisis and, in parallel, the pressure on academia to become “relevant”?
In my talk, I will introduce some key concepts from the realm of Science for Policy and discuss how they apply to environmental history. I will try to look at the different ways in which members of our community could get involved in policy making, in what roles and with which stakeholders. I will also present in detail one case study from the EU context, looking at what made it relatively successful. The general goal of my talk will be to share some tools for action and encourage creative discussion and sharing of experience.
Monsters, catastrophes and the Anthropocene. For a postcolonial critique of violent bio- and necropolitics
Gaia Giuliani, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Within a critical analysis of logics, ontologies and narratives of the Anthropocene, and a rethinking of the relationship between biopower and colonial and racist narratives, caught in a circular relationship of co-(re)production, my paper is framed in a reflection on the nexus between catastrophe, monstrification and bio/necropolitics that expose certain subjects to premature and violent death, and their eccentric epistemologies resisting violent erasure. It originates in a reflection on the relationship between the extractive violence of racial capitalism, colonial archives of race, and their use between modernity and postmodernity, and the impact they have in terms of an epistemic violence that reduces the complexity the relationship between human life, non-human life and non-life (Povinelli 2016) within the exploitative and extractive ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene.
One of the bio/necropolitical and performative devices at the disposal of such logics and ontologies is the border, understood as that social and historical construction that today allows the reproduction of colonial and racist categories, imaginaries and narratives that distinguish a We-to-be-saved (culture) from catastrophe and a You (nature) to be sacrificed to it for the benefit of the We. Through, then, the analysis of the figure of the fugitive in modernity and today as a “monster” functional to the delegitimisation of certain human and non-human forms of life and, conversely, as a subject, individual and collective, resistant, my paper seeks to contribute to the contemporary debate on processes of monstrification, necropolitics, racial capitalism and its epistemologies.