Pavla Šimková
Network coordinator
Pavla Šimková is a historian with an interest in East Central European and American environmental history. She is a researcher at the Collegium Carolinum in Munich, where she edits the Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte der böhmischen Länder. Pavla received her doctorate in American cultural history and East European history from LMU Munich in 2019. From 2020 until 2023, she was post-doctoral researcher in the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Her current research focuses on transboundary conservation history in the Bavarian Forest and Šumava.
contact: pavla.simkova@collegium-carolinum.de
Katie Ritson
Co-coordinator
Katie Ritson, a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities with a particular interest in Northern Europe, is a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society as well as an affiliated researcher in the Institute for Scandinavian Studies at LMU Munich. Katie was Co-PI of the Corridor Talk project on European national parks, is a coordinator of ENSCAN and has previously worked on the literary and historical imaginaries of North Sea coasts. Her current research is situated in the same general geographical area but has moved a bit further OFFSHORE, investigating oil extraction and the energy cultures of the Scottish and Norwegian North Sea.
contact: katie.ritson@carsoncenter.lmu.de
Jonathan Carruthers-Jones
Jonathan Carruthers-Jones’ research is focused on the complex issues which surround human-nature interactions and how they relate to the long-term success of conservation, especially in remote or mountainous locations. Methodologically, he uses a participatory approach, working with a range of in-situ visual and acoustic mapping tools. Jonathan is especially interested in how diverse research methods can be integrated to address the growing challenges facing the conservation of nature. His study sites include the Scottish Highlands, the French Pyrénées and the Swedish and Finnish Arctic as part of CONTOURS, Corridor Talk, and the MUST project. Listen for example to some recent work on ecoacoustics.
Eveline de Smalen
Eveline de Smalen is a researcher in comparative literature and environmental humanities and completed a PhD at the Rachel Carson Center in 2019. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” and as a curator for the World Heritage Centre Wadden Sea in Lauwersoog. She is currently working on an ethnography of COVID-19 heritage walks in Belgium for the project GLAMMONS and is founder and coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Groningen.
contact: e.r.de.smalen@rug.nl
Astrid M. Eckert
Astrid M. Eckert is professor of modern German and European history at Emory University in Atlanta. Her most recent book West Germany and the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2019) provided the first environmental history of the inter-German border. Eckert continues this focus on environmental history with two projects: one engages German climate diplomacy during the 1990s; the other looks at the national park program of the late German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and asks how this program shaped nature conservation in Germany after unification.
contact: aeckert@emory.edu
Frederike Felcht
Frederike Felcht is a professor of Modern Scandinavian Literature and Culture and the managing director of the Institute for Scandinavian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main research areas are modern Nordic literature, environmental humanities, and hunger and poverty in Nordic literature. Her current research focuses on literature and biodiversity. Together with Roland Borgards and Frederike Middelhoff, Frederike is responsible for the research field ‘Environmental Humanities‘ at the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften in Frankfurt. She is a member of ENSCAN and the research group ‘Romantische Ökologien’.
contact: felcht@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Bernhard Gissibl
Bernhard Gissibl is a permanent Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. His research interests include environmental history and multispecies studies, the history of conservation and its sciences, and the intersections between religion and environment, e.g. the ways conservationists sacralize the nature they seek to preserve. He has published widely on the colonial history of hunting, conservation, and the wildlife sciences, respectively international entanglements in the spread of protected areas. His current research deals with the Serengeti as an epistemic site for multispecies relations, particularly through the lens of the wildlife sciences as practiced at the Serengeti Research Institute during the 1960s and 1970s.
contact: gissibl@ieg-mainz.de
Sabine Höhler
Sabine Höhler is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she serves as Head of Department of Philosophy and History. She holds a MSc degree in physics and a PhD in history of science and technology. Her research addresses the intersections of technoscience and environmental history in a global historical perspective, from atmospheric physics and climate science to physical oceanography and space ecology. Recent projects include “Life on Mars: The Science and Fiction of Terraforming and the Future of Planet Earth”, “The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs”, and the Center of Excellence for Anthropocene History at KTH.
contact: sabine.hoehler@abe.kth.se
George Holmes
George Holmes is Professor of Conservation and Society at the University of Leeds, UK. His research looks at two connected areas. Firstly, the values, structures and politics of professional conservationists and the conservation movement, with particular focus on NGOs, private conservation, philanthropy, the spread of market-based instruments, and rewilding and species reintroductions. Secondly, the relationship between conservation projects, particularly national parks, protected areas and rewilding and reintroduction projects, with the human communities living in and around these.
contact: G.Holmes@leeds.ac.uk
Graham Huggan
Graham Huggan is Professor of English at the University of Leeds (UK), where his research straddles three fields – postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and environmental humanities – all of which are represented in his latest monograph, Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (Bloomsbury, 2018). His most recent book is the co-authored Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines (2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize. Huggan currently directs a doctoral training programme (DTP) in Extinction Studies, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and was recently Co-PI, together with Katie Ritson, for the AHRC/DFG-funded “Corridor Talk” research project on European national parks.
contact: G.D.M.Huggan@leeds.ac.uk
Laura Kuen
Laura Kuen is a visual and environmental anthropologist with interest in human-
animal relations in Eastern Europe, especially rural Ukraine. Laura studied Social
and cultural Anthropology and Environmental Humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society. She is currently doing her doctorate at Charles University in Prague and is part of the BOAR ERC project at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Laura also worked as a documentary filmmaker and co-curated exhibitions for the Deutsches Museum and the Rachel Carson Center. She currently works on the travelling exhibition Land.schafft.Klang that explores the acoustic dimension of biodiversity loss in Bavarian agricultural landscapes.
contact: kuen@eu.cas.cz
Lukas Kunerth
Student assistant
Lukas is currently pursuing their MA in Environment and Society at the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich and working as a student assistant in OFFSHORE. Coming from an Environmental Science background, they have conducted research on the cultural dimensions and local imaginaries of wolf returns to the Black Forest in Southern Germany. Some of their further research interests are Queer Ecologies, forest, all kinds of animals that look like they have hands and the linkages between extractivism and nature conservation.
contact: lukaskunerth@web.de
Anna Kolářová
Anna is a PhD student of modern social history at the Charles University in Prague and works as a junior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, as a part of the National Institute for Research on Socioeconomic Impacts of Diseases and Systemic Risks (SYRI). She studied history and ethnology in Prague and Leipzig and public history in Regensburg. Her dissertation project focuses on nature-based tourism in the Bohemian and Bavarian Forest 1870–1950. Outside of the environmental history of Central Eastern European tourism, her interests lie in Czech-German cultures of memory, museum studies, and the role of history in identity construction.
contact: kolarovaanna000@gmail.com
Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Caitríona Ní Dhúill is professor for Modern German literature at Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria. With a PhD in German Studies, her research interests include the intersection between literature and environmental awareness, the role that literature can play in the Anthropocene, and (literary and environmental) utopias. When not working on Rewilding German Studies, Caitríona is also acting as an academic ambassador for Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalisation.
contact: caitriona.nidhuill@plus.ac.at
Roger Norum
Roger Norum is associate professor in the field of cultural anthropology at the University of Oulu. His research focuses on the comparative and praxeological dimensions of how mobility, infrastructure, and sociality mediate human relationships to the environment. Roger was a PI on CONTOURS and ENVIROCEN and is currently part of several research projects working on the topics of silence, mobility and multilingualism while also serving as deputy director of the research programme Biodiverse Anthropocenes and founding editor of the Palgrave MacMillan book series Arctic Encounters.
contact: Roger.Norum@oulu.fi
Jana Piňosová
Jana Piňosová, a historian, has been a researcher at the Sorbian Institute in Budyšin/Bautzen, Germany, since 2015. She earned her doctorate at the University of Bonn with a dissertation entitled “Inspiration Natur. Naturschutz in den böhmischen Ländern bis 1933” (published in Marburg 2017). Her academic work focuses on environmental history and historical minority research, with particular emphasis on the complexities of the Sorbian national minority in the 20th century. Recently, she co-edited a volume at the Sorbian Institute on the perception of nature and ethnic minorities entitled “Minderheit – Macht – Natur. Verhandlungen im Zeitalter des Nationalstaats” (published in Bautzen 2022).
contact: jana.pinosova@serbski-institut.de
Nicola Thomas
Nicola Thomas is Lecturer in German Studies at Lancaster University. She is interested in cultural ways of knowing space, place and time across geographical and linguistic boundaries, and is currently leading two British Academy funded projects which address questions of time and temporality in the Anthropocene in comparative contexts. The collaborative interdisciplinary project Wetland Times examines the multiple temporalities of wetland landscapes (Morecambe Bay, the Wadden Sea, and the Congo Basin), showing how different temporal narratives can be used to inform conservation and environmental education practices.
contact: nicola.thomas@lancaster.ac.uk
Monica Vasile
Monica’s current research examines global histories of wildlife conservation, exploring practices of conservation management and production of wildlife science aimed at undoing imminent extinctions. She researches three case-studies – Przewalski’s horses, Vancouver Island marmots and the takahe rails of New Zealand. Monica is currently writing her second PhD, in environmental history, as part of the research group ‘Moving Animals‘ at Maastricht University. Her career includes fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center as well as research roles at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Romanian Academy of Sciences. Monica also has practical expertise as a consultant for environmental organizations, particularly in European bison rewilding in the Carpathian Mountains.
contact: monica.vasile01@gmail.com
Cormac Walsh
Dr. Cormac Walsh is an interdisciplinary social science researcher at the University of Oldenburg. He is a human geographer by training. In parallel, he works with environmental NGOs and public authorities on nature conservation, spatial planning and environmental policy issues in his capacity as an independent researcher and consultant. His current work in Oldenburg focuses on understanding bird migration geographies and the challenges they pose to the dominant territorial logic of nature conservation and protected area management.
contact: drcormacwalsh@gmail.com
Anna-Katharina Wöbse
Anna-Katharina Wöbse is an environmental historian and curator. She earned her PhD with a study on the environmental diplomacy in the interwar period and has extensively published on the history of national parks, human-animal relations, European wetlands, environmental photography and conservation movements. In 2022, Patrick Kupper and Anna edited a handbook on European nature preservation, conservation and environmentalism: “Greening Europe – Environmental Protection in the Long 20th Century” (de Gruyter/Oldenbourg). Her recent book “Sylt – fragile Schönheit” explored the environmental biography of an island in the Wadden Sea (KJM Verlag, 2023).
contact: mail@umwelthistorische-recherche.de
CONSERVATION HUMANITIES 