Welcome

Please join us at the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability for a seminar with the Department of History's Dr Tom Simpson.

We encourage attendees to bring their own refreshments.

How to Attend

The seminar will be hosted both in-person and online - see details below for how to connect.

In-person - S0.09 at 14:00 (see campus mapLink opens in a new window)

Online - via Microsoft Teams accessible at bit.ly/ceh-simpson-teamsLink opens in a new window

Habitable histories: Theories of life, race, and climate in the age of high imperialism

Although for astronomers around the turn of the twentieth century, habitation was becoming a multi-planetary topic, a wider array of geographers, explorers, and bureaucrats at this juncture pondered the limits of life in relation to peripheral spaces on Earth. This paper focuses on a region of climatic and topographic 'extremes' and of increasing intense rivalries between empires: Central Asia. I discuss how speculations about the possibilities and limits of human and nonhuman life were deeply enmeshed in concepts of racial difference, alibis for imperial rule, and conjectures of glorious pasts, degraded presents, and uncertain futures. The paper considers which—and whose—knowledge counted in these debates, and points to how notions of habitability in the era high empire continue to haunt imaginaries of life in the Anthropocene.

When?

Friday 24th January 2025 - 14:00 GMT

Where?

S0.09Link opens in a new window

or on Microsoft TeamsLink opens in a new window

Who?

Everyone is Welcome!

Dr Tom Simpson

Dr Tom Simpson is an historian of environmental and climate sciences. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental history, history of science, and imperial and colonial history. He is currently co-writing "Making Global Temperature" with seven colleagues on the 'Making Climate History' project based at the University of Cambridge. This book considers the long history of concepts and measures of global temperature from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

Alongside this work, Tom has established interests in the histories of mountainous and riverine spaces, the history of cartography and anthropology, the interaction of European imperial and non-Western knowledge systems, and the question of how history should be written and taught in the Anthropocene. All of these areas feed into an ongoing book project entitled "Maps that made climate change", which explores how climate has been depicted and conceptualised in various cartographic traditions across the world.

Please visit Tom's webpageLink opens in a new window for more information on his work.