Events & Calls

In the Sharing Local Stories webinar series, we invite you to discover how these practices have been implemented at local and regional levels. In collaboration with partners of the Hub and participants from the open call, we highlight inspirational stories and practical examples while engaging in a wider conversation on the role of cultural heritage in an urban context.

The fourth edition, titled ‘Sharing Local Stories: Connecting Heritage and Sustainable Living Through Water’, will be held online on Wednesday, 18 June 2025, 15:30 – 17:00 CET. It will focus on the historical, social and environmental significance of water heritage in cities, approaches to green and blue urban regeneration, water heritage to connect people, and the role of heritage in mitigating the effects and adapting to climate change in urban contexts.

Water is an essential part of human life and cultural heritage. Throughout history, water management made urban settlements and cultural achievements possible, generating material and immaterial heritage, for instance, water supply systems, flood protection, dams and water wheels, waterscapes and urban deltas. This cultural heritage is not only worth protecting for its rich historical and architectural value, but also a source of inspiration for sustainable solutions to water-specific problems.

In a context of rising water scarcity and extreme climate events, renovating unused water sources and greening urban spaces are increasingly seen as a way of mitigating the effects of climate change, building fairer and more resilient societies. 

This webinar will explore the contemporary significance of water heritage as historical public infrastructure and a resource for sustainable living through two local examples in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Chalandri, Greece. 

To further promote and facilitate dialogue within this growing field of research, the RIAS and the Dutch Environmental History Network (DEHN) are organizing an International PhD Seminar in Environmental History. This two-day seminar has four objectives:

1) To provide a platform to discuss works in progress;

2) To connect junior and senior environmental history scholars with one another;

3) To facilitate an exchange of research traditions and methodologies;

4) To critically engage with current debates on issues like climate change and biodiversity.

We welcome proposals dealing with any timeframe or empirical focus engaging with environmental issues, especially in regard to the history of the United States. We also invite proposals that showcase in particular how engaging with the environment in historical research challenges and changes approaches to:

• Place (e.g. definitions and boundaries of places in terms of landscape, ecosystems, or extractive geographies);
• Scale (e.g. micro and macro histories, writing oceans, climatic regions, river systems into history but also bacteria, insects, and atoms);
• Time (e.g. deep time, multiple temporalities, circular and rhythmic time);
• Agency (e.g. who and what has agency beyond humans, what are the politics of agency.

The deadline for proposals is November 30.

The RIAS and Utrecht University are now welcoming papers for the jointly organized symposium “The Montreal Moment: Ozone Depletion and the Rise of International Environmental Governance,” which will be held in Middelburg from 5-6 June 2025. We invite proposals that address (some of) the questions and that put the Montreal Protocol within the broader framework of environmental internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Local, national, regional, and transnational perspectives are mostly welcomed, as well as contributions that shed further light on the politics and diplomacy of the agreement. We look for interpretations that add to the ongoing historiographical debate, help expand the historical reflection on the agency of international environmental history, and challenge traditional approaches through innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies.
The deadline for abstract submissions is December 15.

The 2025 meeting of the Agricultural History Society will convene in St. Paul, Minnesota. As they gather on the banks of the Mississippi River, in the state aptly nicknamed the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, they invite scholars to engage with the twin themes of water and agriculture.

From its origins thousands of years ago, to its present and future in the context of the climate crisis, agriculture is interlocked with water. Evolutions and revolutions of farming across time and space have paralleled evolutions and revolutions in how human societies have understood and used water in its many forms. Water is a necessary, but also highly contested, element of production. Its relationship with agriculture is profoundly political.

Agricultural historians have long strived to capture the historical complexity of this relationship, and agricultural history serves as an ideal terrain for encounters among a broad range of historiographical approaches and diverse perspectives: from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences; and from within and beyond academia. We envisage this conference as an opportunity to sustain and expand this cross-disciplinary conversation on the water-agriculture nexus.

The world is facing multiple ecological and political crises that make shared, sustainable futures difficult to envision, with many of these crises deeply rooted in, and perpetuated by, extractivist and capitalist power structures propagated by colonialism. Additionally, violent conflicts unfolding in the Middle East, Ukraine and across the globe eliminate sustainable futures for multiple lives, ecologies, and communities, all while sustaining robust military economies whose flows of capital and munitions accumulate wealth in colonial centres of power. We invite submissions reflecting on the theme of sustainability in these multiple senses, specifically focused on interventions made by cultural texts, artistic practices, and theoretical frameworks in the fields of postcolonial, decolonial, or anticolonial thought. How do cultural mediations and their particular forms and genres intervene in our understanding and approach toward political/ecological crises and sustainability? Alternatively, how might we rethink the discourse of sustainability itself, troubling its frequently neoliberal, “business-as-usual” investment in maintaining untenable ecologies, materialities, and socialities? Broadly speaking, how do our association’s disciplinary frameworks challenge the market logic of “sustainability” discourse? More urgently, how are we to envision a more equitable world amidst neoliberalism’s nascent decline amidst the emergence of rightwing populism?

While CFP centers sustainability and shared futures in postcolonial thought, CAPS welcomes any proposals related to postcolonial and global literary and cultural studies. This includes environmental humanities, water, aquatic regions and crossings, hydrocolonialism, and the Black Atlantic or Black Pacific.
The deadline for proposals in January 15, 2025.

The American Historical Association will host a three-week long National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Higher Education Faculty on US environmental history and policy from the early 19th century through the 20th century. Situated at the intersection of environmental, Indigenous, and political history, this institute will explore how humans have contributed and adjusted to environmental changes. This long historical context is crucial for understanding what differentiates current emissions-driven climate change from what came before.

Drawing on local collections, including those of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, and the local environment as a laboratory, the institute will provide a combination of historical content, methodological approaches, and additional professional development opportunities.

The first two weeks of the institute will be held June 1–13, 2025, in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, located on the Clinton Library campus. The institute will conclude with one week of online engagement among Institute faculty and participants.

The RIAS and the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University invite paper proposals for a jointly organized conference on the role that water – in all its forms and manifestations – has played in the history of the United States. The conference will be held at the RIAS in Middelburg on 21-23 May 2025.

The North American Society for Oceanic History invites you to join them at the Grand Hotel in Natchez, Mississippi for their 2025 conference from May 15-17. 

For thousands of years, a vast complex of inland waters shaped the lives and cultures of indigenous North Americans. These same waters allowed European states to establish and maintain outposts of empire thousands of miles from the Atlantic Ocean. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, inland waters made it possible for millions of Euro-Americans to move west and establish the cities and farms that became the foundations of North America’s modern agricultural and industrial economies. 

This year NASOH is recognizing the complicated historical legacy of North America’s inland waters by meeting at Natchez, Mississippi. Located on the Mississippi River at the western terminus of the Natchez Trace, an overland trail connecting the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers, Natchez was a natural point of exchange and location of important Indigenous ceremonial mounts. The French, recognizing the area’s importance-built Fort Rosalie in 1716. The present city is named after the Natchez Indians, and its subsequent culture and history are the products of Indigenous, French, English, Spanish, African, and American influences. A natural stopping place and base for keelboats and flatboats, and later steamboats, Natchez became the first capital of the Mississippi Territory and the second-largest slave trading market in the United States. Celebrated for its surviving antebellum architecture and southern heritage, Natchez is also a testament to the enduring and pervasive influences of maritime connections and inland waters in North America.

The American Society for Environmental History invites proposals for its annual conference, to be held April 9-13, 2025, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a location that holds a unique place in both American history and the narrative of global environmental change.

The theme, “Forging Environments: Confluence, Resilience, Intersectionality,” speaks directly to Pittsburgh’s past. Located where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers form the Ohio, the city sits on lands historically stewarded by the Onödowá’ga:’ (Seneca), saawanwa (Shawnee) and Lenape (Delaware) peoples. These nations intersected in an environment rich with natural resources at the gateway to the continent’s heartland. Later, the extraction of the area’s coal, timber, natural gas, and limestone by colonizers forged new landscapes. But the Steel City’s industrial might came at a significant environmental and human cost, necessitating remediation and mitigation strategies in the face of deindustrialization. Now a hub for technology and finance, the Greater Pittsburgh region stands as a monument to environmental resilience and renewal.

The theme also reminds us that all over the world, similar convergences, transformations, and resiliencies have produced altered ecologies and forged new environments. The processes that have contributed to these creations—colonialism, dispossession, war, industry, labor, capitalism, restoration, climate change, and more—speak to the intersectionality of environmental history and the field’s ability to foster a deeper awareness of connections across time, space, and ecologies. In a rapidly warming world, the stories of how global societies have navigated the challenges of environmental change in the past are urgently needed to help us see a path forward.

The Colorado State University Water Resources Archive is now welcoming applications for the Water Scholar Award. This annual award grants funding to researchers whose work on western water would benefit from access to the collection. The award is intended to help offset the expenses of researchers engaged in studies that will benefit from access to the holdings of the Water Resources Archive as well as costs associated with presentations, publications, or other products resulting from that research. 

For the 2025 award, the total amount of funding is capped at $3,200, to be allocated to a maximum of three applications. Please apply only for the amount needed. Of special interest are applications concerning historical research related to the Colorado River Interim Guidelines expiration in 2026.

Applications are due January 31.

A new “culture of water” cannot grow without memory. Memories, whether they are sensory or emotional, short-term or long-term, material or immaterial, are fundamental to our existence as individuals and as collective societies.

The curatorial team of I Remember Water selected some meaningful images that recall our past water memories and reflect on pathways that can help us shape our water futures.

From the ornate public fountains and household taps that in the last century provided free water to citizens in growing urban settlements to the impacts of climate change and our emotional relationships with water – all collected images illustrate the rich diversity and the striking affinities of humankind’s connections with water and its unique heritage across the world.

From the ornate public fountains and household taps that in the last century provided free water to citizens in growing urban settlements to the impacts of climate change and our emotional relationships with water – all collected images illustrate the rich diversity and the striking affinities of humankind’s connections with water and its unique heritage across the world.

Water governance has long been a slippery subject at the international level. The recent UN Water Conference may usher a new era of cooperation for the achievement of water-related SDGs. One year in, what initiatives are clearing a new way forward for sustainable and peaceful water governance?