About the event:
Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. This talk will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will focus on three key moments in North Sea history: the creation of urban docklands in the early nineteenth century, the industrialisation of sea fishing in the mid nineteenth century, and migration from Europe to North America around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary images of North Sea landscapes will frame the historical discussion. Dr Grinsell will suggest that the Anthropocene creates an urgent need for histories that can not only enliven our sense of the past but also position our present as a moment of open contestation where the past is enlisted in support of rival visions of the future.
About the speakers:
Dr Sam Grinsell,British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Bartlett School of Architecture
Prof. Richard Staley
Dr Giulia Champion, Research Fellow (Anniversary Fellowship) at University of Southampton
This event is organised by The Bartlett School for Architecture, the UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Transnational and Global History.
