Museum drawers and field sites across the East of England hold the physical evidence of how scientists and local communities came to understand climate change over the past century, and this project will dig through those collections to recover that forgotten history. The problem is that we know surprisingly little about how our current understanding of long-term environmental change was built. The region’s archives contain geological specimens, scientific instruments, archaeological records, and field notes from decades of research, but no one has systematically studied how these collections shaped—and were shaped by—changing ideas about climate and place. This project fills that gap by tracing the intellectual and social history of environmental science in one of the UK’s most climate-sensitive regions. If successful, the research will produce a pioneering account of how global environmental change connects to a specific region. This matters for how museums curate climate-related collections, how local communities interpret their own landscapes, and how future researchers understand the foundations of climate science. The work is fundamentally historical and humanities-driven—it will not produce new climate data or models, but it will reveal how the knowledge we already rely on came to be, which could inform how science communicates with the public about environmental change.
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The history and heritage of the discovery of environmental change and the interpretation of place in the East of England aims to show how local and global understandings of climate and the environment have been created in the east of England, by exploring the sites, museum collections and academic research groups that have delivered new understandings of place and changing climate in this region, since the early twentieth century. It takes advantage of several archival and museum collections of documents, instruments, specimens and sites, to invite innovative research that investigates how deeper understandings of place in the east of England were developed over the last one hundred years. The project will offer the student the opportunity to work across two or three areas of focus, including: 1) archival research on scientific studies of long-term environmental and climatic change 2) fieldwork drawing on approaches from the humanities including historical geography to establish a study of climate in place, examining one or more archaeological sites and communities in the east of England to explore how academic researchers changed understandings of place and worked with local communities at long-term research sites to relate different elements of climate, agriculture and landscape 3) the treatment of climate through geological specimens, scientific instruments, and archaeological research and displays in museums, exploring how collections have been assembled, used, curated and interpreted to establish changing perspectives on place and time, and how climate and place have been represented. Its outcome will be a pioneering study of how long-term global environmental change relates to the region.
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