David Blackbourn: Nature and Environment in Modern Germany: A Difficult History

Drawing on some of the themes raised by his 2006 book 'The Conquest of Nature', Professor David Blackbourn (Vanderbilt) will talk about the transformation of the German landscape since the late eighteenth century in an approach that seeks to combine environmental, cultural and political history.

This seminar was hosted by the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University on 4 August 2022.

About the Speaker:
David Blackbourn is Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in the USA. He was educated at Cambridge and taught at London University (1976-92) and Harvard (1992-2012) before moving to Vanderbilt. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, he is the author of Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (1980), The Peculiarities of German History [with Geoff Eley] (1984), Populists and Patricians (1987), Marpingen (1993), The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (1997) The Conquest of Nature (2006), and Landschaften der deutschen Geschichte (2016). He has just completed a book called “Germany in the World, 1500-2000”, which will appear in 2023.