General Assembly 2016

There will be an ICEHO General Assembly on Friday 1 April 2016, 6:30pm to 7:30pm, Grand 2 Room (Level 4), Westin Seattle Hotel, Seattle, WA, in conjunction with the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) annual meeting.

The assembly will include voting for President, Vice-President, and Ordinary Members of the ICEHO Board, which is done by ballot. We invite the member organizations to make additional nominations from the floor for any of these positions, and especially encourage nominations for Vice-President. According to the ICEHO Constitution, the procedure for such nominations is:

Additional nominations may be made from the floor of the General Assembly, provided that each person so nominated has the support in writing of his or her Member Association or Institutional Member, and at least three (3) other Members, and subject to confirmation that the nominee agrees to serve if elected. Such nominations shall be accompanied by biographical details.

Each member organization is entitled to one Voting Representative at the meeting. An organization can also vote by proxy by notifying the Secretary of the person who will be voting on the member’s behalf.

Devastating Fire Postpones Call For Papers Deadline Until 1 October

On September 2, 2018, a massive fire devastated the National Museum of Brazil. Founded 200 years ago, the museum is Brazil's oldest scientific institution and one of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin America, with a collection of 20 million artifacts and specimens. Newspapers around the world have published many articles about this tragic event, and the list of destroyed artifacts is now an almost familiar recitation of mourning: the butterfly and entomology collections, the archives, the Egyptian collection, the mounted dinosaurs, the recording of indigenous voices, the Anthropology Library. Luzia, the oldest human fossil found in the Brazilian territory, is lost. It is a loss not only for Brazilians, but for scientists and scholars around the world

For Brazilian environmental historians, the Museum is a particularly cherished space. It is connected to the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and generations of Brazilian scientists have graduated there. Many environmental historians have explored the archives of the National Museum, taken classes there, studied the paleontology collections, written theses, articles and books about the artifacts and those who collected the precious artifacts, and about what the Museum meant to national science and to the concept of nature in Brazil. 
As Brazil is preparing to host the 3rd World Congress of Environmental History in July 2019, in Florianópolis, this loss is deeply felt. In light of this devastating loss, we ask for help from the international community of environmental historians. If you have researched at the National Museum, if you have images of the collections, the artifacts, or any related documents, please send copies to museunacional.ufrj.br/memoria (it is an institutional link.) If your institution would like to support the National Museum of Brazil in a more concrete way, write to falecomdiretor@mn.ufrj.br
Due to these exceptional circumstances, the Organizing Committee of the 3rd World Congress of Environmental History agreed to extend the deadline for proposal submissions until October 1st.

We hope this extension will allow for everyone interested in taking part in proposals for the academic program of this exciting conference.

EHCA Prize For Interdisciplinary Research In Environmental History

On the occasion of the 3rd WCEH, Florianopolis, Brazil, The Environmental History Cluster Austria will hand out its first EHCA Prize:

The aim and scope of the prize is to acknowledge conceptual and empirical approaches to environmental history, which are interdisciplinary and contribute significantly to advancing the field as an interdisciplinary endeavour. While environmental history tends to use the data of a large range of disciplines as their sources, and hence often is multi-disciplinary, some approaches are made possible because of a very intense integration of concepts, approaches, methods and data from various disciplines. Such work needs an extra effort and is often bound to teams, a form or organisation of research that the historical profession has taken up less than other disciplines. For further information on how to apply check this document: EHCA Prize.