BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//jEvents 2.0 for Joomla//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/Rome BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20230227T000000 RDATE:20230326T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231029T020000 RDATE:20240331T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20241027T020000 RDATE:20250330T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20251026T020000 RDATE:20260329T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20261025T020000 RDATE:20270328T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20271031T020000 RDATE:20280326T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20281029T020000 RDATE:20290325T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20291028T020000 RDATE:20300331T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20301027T020000 RDATE:20310330T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20311026T020000 RDATE:20320328T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CET END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20230326T030000 RDATE:20231029T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240331T030000 RDATE:20241027T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20250330T030000 RDATE:20251026T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20260329T030000 RDATE:20261025T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20270328T030000 RDATE:20271031T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20280326T030000 RDATE:20281029T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20290325T030000 RDATE:20291028T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20300331T030000 RDATE:20301027T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20310330T030000 RDATE:20311026T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:Europe/Rome CEST END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:e7b5afa8ef7a2d730c3f4f015eae5111 CATEGORIES:Bandi di varia natura CREATED:20240114T123710 SUMMARY:Call for applications: Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences 2024 DESCRIPTION:Humans, Natures and the Nature of Humans\nEighteenth Ischia Summer School o n the History of the Life Sciences\nBiblioteca Antoniana, Ischia, Italy, 30 June – 7 July 2024\n\nApplications are invited for this week-long summer s chool, which provides advanced training in history of the life sciences thr ough lectures, seminars and discussions in a historically rich and naturall y beautiful setting. The theme for 2024 is "Humans, Natures and the Nature of Humans". \n\nOrganizers: Christiane Groeben (Naples, local organiser), N ick Hopwood (University of Cambridge), Erika L. Milam (Princeton University ), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge) and the Stazione Zoologic a Anton Dohrn\n\nConfirmed faculty: Christophe Bonneuil (Centre des recherc hes historiques, CNRS/EHESS, Paris, France), Rebecca Flemming (University o f Exeter, UK), Jia Hui Lee (University of Bayreuth, Germany), Sadiah Quresh i (University of Manchester, UK), Laura Martin (Williams College, USA), Pie tro Daniel Omodeo (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy), Amanda Rees (U niversity of York, UK), Suman Seth (Cornell University, USA)\n\nWe thank th e Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn and the collector George Loudon for financ ial support.\nMore information: < (http://ischiasummerschool.org/)http:/ /ischiasummerschool.org/ (http://ischiasummerschool.org/)>\nDeadline for applications: 28 February 2024\n\nAbout the school\nThe Ischia Summer Scho ol on the History of the Life Sciences provides advanced training in a live ly international field that offers a long-term perspective on some of the m ost significant ideas, practices and institutions in the world today. The s chool, which has a tradition of association with the Naples Zoological Stat ion, was revived in 2005 after a break of two decades and has run every oth er year since then other than during the coronavirus pandemic. We can accom modate up to 26 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The event provi des a structured learning experience plus extensive opportunities for parti cipation and interaction. English is the working language and we encourage  exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, national cultures and his torical periods. Spending the week on an island, staying in the same hotel  and sharing breaks and meals maximizes opportunities for exchange. These ar e enhanced through social events, including a welcome reception and a day t rip to Naples, the morning spent learning about the history and current res earch of the Station, the afternoon free for sightseeing. There will also b e a free afternoon to explore Ischia itself.\n\nIntroduction to the theme\n In May 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group formed under the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy proposed that a new geological “epoch” should be gin with the early 1950s. In this period thermonuclear bomb tests left a re cord of radioactive fallout in sediments around the globe, and the surge in measures of human activity that demographers and historians term the “Grea t Acceleration” began. The working group’s intervention seems to have close d the question of how to demarcate the anthropocene in geological strata, t hough the proposal still awaits ratification by the International Commissio n on Stratigraphy.\nBut in debates over when the anthropocene began, and wh ether it deserves to be considered a unique period in earth’s history, more has always been at stake than a technical question of demarcation in strat igraphy. Depending on when one dates the start of the period when humans be gan to interfere in nature’s course, responsibility for the current climate and biodiversity crisis is either placed on humanity as such, or on the em ergence of animal domestication and agriculture, or on industrialization, c olonization and capitalism as relatively recent historical developments ori ginating in “the West”. This in turn raises questions about the relationshi ps with the natural world of different groups of humans, and thus about dis tributive and environmental justice. Who should be held accountable for the  damage caused by climate change, and who should be listened to when it com es to developing solutions mitigating those harms? Answers to these questio ns highlight alternative ways of thinking about and being in the world that might better accommodate the lifeways of other organisms and put the cours e of human development onto a more sustainable path.\nThis summer school pr ovides an opportunity to take stock critically of the historical presumptio ns that underwrite the current anthropocene discourse with its emphasis on fateful developments in the past, uniqueness of the current crisis and urge ncy in developing new visions of the future. Our discussions will follow th ree thematic strands through their manifestations in ancient, modern and in digenous cultures. The first is cosmological and relates to what nineteenth -century naturalists called “man’s place in nature.” The second is temporal and addresses cyclical and stadial conceptions of change and progress. The third, which is anthropological, concerns our physical and moral relations hips with other beings, whether other humans, other species or other entiti es altogether. All three strands revolve around what philosophers call the “human condition”, that is, the facts that humans are born from, live withi n, and ultimately return to nature, while sharing the capacity to create an d carve out their own “cultural” niches from it.\n\n“Premodern” worldviews are often said to be static, or at most cyclical, yet in antiquity, in west and east, the human body was understood as dynamically embedded in its env ironment, and earthly life as subject to imperfection and decay. Humoral pa thology as developed in ancient Greece, like the theory of circulating “vit al energies” (qi) in traditional Chinese medicine, established a fundamenta l relation between the human body and the surrounding elements that needed to be balanced to achieve well-being. This left more room for projects of i mprovement than is usually assumed. These theories not only accounted for i ndividual health, which in light of knowledge of one’s constitution could b e promoted by careful management of lifestyle. They could also be transpose d, through agriculture and sound government, to the level of collectives. A remarkable body of ancient Roman literature, for example, was dedicated to agricultural themes and the notion that nature could be “improved”, indeed that cultivation could bring out the “true” nature of plants, animals and humans. At the same time, luxurious lifestyles and exploitative behaviours provoked early warnings, such as from Seneca, against the detrimental effec ts of urban air pollution and deforestation.\n\nDietetics and agriculture, their grounding in seasonal cycles and local “climates”, and an associated ethics of improvement through wise governance—these formed powerful traditi ons that were transmitted by Arabic and Latin scholars through the middle a ges and have counterparts in other world cultures. The continuing emphasis on use and improvement might serve as a warning against the prevalent assum ption that a holistic, “closed” worldview will prevent those who hold it fr om treating nature as a means to an end. With the Renaissance, and the disc overy of the “New World”, important shifts occurred nevertheless. The Europ ean discovery of America placed all of creation on a shared “terraqueous gl obe”. This challenged representations of cosmological “spheres” and habitab le “climates”—the torrid zone morphing into the tropical, for example—and r aised questions about the status of “exotic” natures. An emphasis on pharma cology, breeding and mining in Europeans’ interactions with their new posse ssions turned nature into a storehouse of resources and forces to be extrac ted and harnessed to produce surplus and promote “civilization”. Whether th is constituted a special European path towards the “death of nature” (Carol yn Merchant), or whether we are dealing rather with global interactions tha t had cumulative effects, is a question the school will explore.\n\nOn the one hand, there is little doubt that with Enlightenment applications of Bac onian science new economics of trade, manufacturing and plantation capitali sm were legitimized in articulations of political economy and the “economy of nature”. Since then, the life sciences have been Janus-faced in their ap proach. The economy of nature was centred on (certain kinds of) humans as b eneficiaries of mastery over natural resources, which crucially included th e gendered household as the ultimate reproductive unit and physical labour by enslaved and waged workers. Projects to optimize the use of these resour ces through survey, incentivization and control form the core of political economy, and knowledge of natural resources was key to their success. In th is context, other species and other cultures were always at risk of being r educed to means (or obstacles) to a politico-economic end, which also inclu ded other classes’ and cultures’ knowledge of plants and animals. Economic botany and zoology in the nineteenth century, and “ethnosciences” in the tw entieth, testify to the intense attention European naturalists paid to this knowledge, notwithstanding their widespread contempt for “primitive” cultu res.\n\nOn the other hand, the economy of nature was increasingly described as a complex web of fragile symbiotic relations among sentient beings that was in need of constant readjustment through adaptation. Especially with M althusianism, extinction became a real possibility, and nineteenth-century  naturalists not only noted the devastating effects of industrialization and  plantation economies on local floras and faunas, but also turned them into  paradigms of dynamic ecologies at a planetary scale. The “sword of extinct ion” (Charles Lyell) wielded by European colonizers, especially against tra ditional lifeways of supposedly “primitive races”, anthropomorphized nature in its epic “struggle for life” and raised the spectre of “vanishing tribe s” and calls for “salvage anthropology”. Ironically, “the Other” often emer ged as a model for a healthy and sustainable life in “harmony” with nature. Such moves problematically associated racialized others with closeness to nature, and intimate knowledge of it, while at the same time asserting Euro pean superiority on the march towards civilization. The “savage mind”, as a mentality to be governed, an obstacle to overcome, and an occasion to refl ect critically upon one’s own position in the world, emerged as a powerful imaginary.\n\nThese trends of the nineteenth century were reinforced in the twentieth. Marine biology, microbiology and parasitology, in conjunction w ith the atmospheric and oceanic sciences, painted increasingly systemic pic tures of life on earth; local ecosystems with their cyclical flows of matte r and energy and fluctuations in population numbers were scrutinized and mo delled in great detail. While industrialization was celebrated for its achi evement of mastery over nature, and modernization theorists denigrated non- industrial forms of life as doomed to die out, ever louder voices were rais ed against human pollution of the planet. Projects of population control ca me out of conservation and environmentalist movements, but these have since the 1970s also become critical of the colonialist practices this promoted. Rather than a given, nature was increasingly seen as needing care and prot ection from human interference. With growing recognition of the anthropogen ic climate crisis, it has become ever clearer that environmental justice an d reproductive justice must go hand in hand. For those humans who have poll uted the most are not those bearing the brunt of rising temperatures, chang ing weather patterns or environmental degradation. If the anthropocene disc ourse may have changed one thing, it is perhaps the realisation that the pl aces of humans in nature, and their obligations to nature, are plural, and hence a matter of choices we make. But even that we suggest taking as a que stion that is open to historical investigation.\n\nThe summer school will e xplore these ambiguities, not only to understand better the past of the ant hropocene, but also to develop perspectives for the future by exposing opti ons from the past. Without neglecting the crucial role that dichotomies of modern and premodern, or “the West and the Rest”, have had in structuring p ast discourses and political action, we thus plan to question such framewor ks in order to achieve an understanding of the human condition that might c ontribute to reflection on the current crisis.\nProgramme\nThe school start s with registration and a reception on the afternoon of Sunday 30 June, and ends after dinner the following Saturday night. Departure is on Sunday 7 J uly. Lectures last for up to 30 minutes in one-hour slots, leaving at least 30 minutes for discussion. Seminars focus on pre-circulated texts. Groups of students will prepare each one with the seminar leader.\n\nRebecca Flemm ing\nLecture: Humans in ancient nature: Order and openness\nSeminar: Human and non-human animals in the ancient world: Natures of exploitation\n\nPiet ro Daniel Omodeo\nLecture: Epistemology of water management in early-modern  Venice\nSeminar: Environmental history of Venetian hydrology in the longue durée\n\nSuman Seth\nLecture: Medicine and the problems of race\nSeminar: Race, seasoning and strangeness\n\nSadiah Qureshi\nLecture: Extinction and empire in the Anthropocene\nSeminar: Hope, and the future of extinction\n\n Christophe Bonneuil\nLecture: TBA\nSeminar: TBA\n\nAmanda Rees\nLecture: Ho w do animals make us human?\nSeminar: Imagining beasts in the post-human fu tures\n\nLaura Martin\nLecture: Designing wildness\nSeminar: Afterlives\n\n Jia Hui Lee\nLecture: The rat: Humanity’s evil twin?\nSeminar: Rodents as a ctors and metaphors\n\nCost\nThere is a fee for students of €400 each, whic h covers hotel accommodation and all meals for the week. Students also need to pay for their own travel to Ischia. The directors will consider request s to waive the fee for accepted students unable to raise the money themselv es, when supported by a detailed financial statement and a letter from thei r department head.\n\nApplications\nApplications should be sent by email to < (mailto:administrator@ischiasummerschool.org)Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.> ; and should include, please:\n\n - a statement specifying academic experie nce and interest in the course topic (max. 300 words),\n - a brief CV,\n - a letter of recommendation.The deadline for applications is midnight CET on  28 February and applicants will be notified of the outcome by 15 March 202 4.\n X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:

Humans, Natures and the Nature of Humans
Eighteenth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences
Biblioteca Antoniana , Ischia, Italy, 30 June – 7 July 2024

Application s are invited for this week-long summer school, which provides advanced tra ining in history of the life sciences through lectures, seminars and discus sions in a historically rich and naturally beautiful setting. The them e for 2024 is "Humans, Natures and the Nature of Humans".& nbsp;

Organizers: Christiane Groeben (Naples, local organiser), Nick Hopwood (University of Cambridge), Erika&nb sp;L. Milam (Princeton University), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of&nbs p;Cambridge) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn


< strong>Confirmed faculty: Christophe Bonneuil (Centre des rec herches historiques, CNRS/EHESS, Paris, France), Rebecca Flemming (Uni versity of Exeter, UK), Jia Hui Lee (University of Bayreuth, Germ any), Sadiah Qureshi (University of Manchester, UK), Laura Martin (Williams  College, USA), Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Ca' Foscari University of Venice , Italy), Amanda Rees (University of York, UK), Suman Seth ( Cornell University, USA)


We thank the Stazione Zoologica A nton Dohrn and the collector George Loudon for fin ancial support.
More information: <http://ischiasummerschool.org/&g t;

Deadline for applications: 28 February 2024


About the school
The Ischia Summer S chool on the History of the Life Sciences provides advanced training i n a lively international field that offers a long-term perspective on some of the most significant ideas, practices and institutions in the world today. The school, which has a tradition of association wit h the Naples Zoological Station, was revived in 2005 after a brea k of two decades and has run every other year since then other than du ring the coronavirus pandemic. We can accommodate up to 26 gradua te students and postdoctoral fellows. The event provides a structured& nbsp;learning experience plus extensive opportunities for participatio n and interaction. English is the working language and we encourage ex change of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, national cultures and& nbsp;historical periods. Spending the week on an island, staying in the sam e hotel and sharing breaks and meals maximizes opportunities for exchange. These are enhanced through social events, including a welcom e reception and a day trip to Naples, the morning spent learning about the history and current research of the Station, the afternoon f ree for sightseeing. There will also be a free afternoon to explore Is chia itself.

Introduction to the theme
In May 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group formed under the Subcommissio n on Quaternary Stratigraphy proposed that a new geological “epoch” sh ould begin with the early 1950s. In this period thermonuclear bomb tes ts left a record of radioactive fallout in sediments around the globe, and the surge in measures of human activity that demographers an d historians term the “Great Acceleration” began. The working group’s intervention seems to have closed the question of how to demarcat e the anthropocene in geological strata, though the proposal still awa its ratification by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

But in debates over when the anthropocene began, and whether it deserves to be considered a unique period in earth’s history, more has always b een at stake than a technical question of demarcation in stratigr aphy. Depending on when one dates the start of the period when humans began to interfere in nature’s course, responsibility for the cur rent climate and biodiversity crisis is either placed on humanity as s uch, or on the emergence of animal domestication and agriculture, or o n industrialization, colonization and capitalism as relatively recent historical developments originating in “the West”. This in turn raises questions about the relationships with the natural world of diff erent groups of humans, and thus about distributive and environmental justice. Who should be held accountable for the damage caused by climate change, and who should be listened to when it comes to develop ing solutions mitigating those harms? Answers to these questions  highlight alternative ways of thinking about and being in the world th at might better accommodate the lifeways of other organisms and put the&nbs p;course of human development onto a more sustainable path.

This summer school provides an opportunity to take stock critically of the historical presumptions that underwrite the current anthropocene disc ourse with its emphasis on fateful developments in the past, uniq ueness of the current crisis and urgency in developing new visions of the future. Our discussions will follow three thematic strands th rough their manifestations in ancient, modern and indigenous cultures. The& nbsp;first is cosmological and relates to what nineteenth-century naturalis ts called “man’s place in nature.” The second is temporal and add resses cyclical and stadial conceptions of change and progress. The th ird, which is anthropological, concerns our physical and moral re lationships with other beings, whether other humans, other species or other entities altogether. All three strands revolve around what philosophers call the “human condition”, that is, the facts that human s are born from, live within, and ultimately return to nature, while s haring the capacity to create and carve out their own “cultural”  niches from it.


“Premodern” worldviews are often said to be sta tic, or at most cyclical, yet in antiquity, in west and east, the huma n body was understood as dynamically embedded in its environment, and earthly life as subject to imperfection and decay. Humoral pathol ogy as developed in ancient Greece, like the theory of circulating&nbs p;“vital energies” (qi) in traditional Chinese medicine, established a fundamental relation between the human body and the surrounding eleme nts that needed to be balanced to achieve well-being. This left m ore room for projects of improvement than is usually assumed. These th eories not only accounted for individual health, which in light of kno wledge of one’s constitution could be promoted by careful management o f lifestyle. They could also be transposed, through agriculture and so und government, to the level of collectives. A remarkable body of ancient Roman literature, for example, was dedicated to agricultural themes and the notion that nature could be “improved”, indeed tha t cultivation could bring out the “true” nature of plants, animals and humans. At the same time, luxurious lifestyles and exploitative  behaviours provoked early warnings, such as from Seneca, against the d etrimental effects of urban air pollution and deforestation.


Di etetics and agriculture, their grounding in seasonal cycles and local  “climates”, and an associated ethics of improvement through wise gover nance—these formed powerful traditions that were transmitted by Arabic and Latin scholars through the middle ages and have counterparts in o ther world cultures. The continuing emphasis on use and improveme nt might serve as a warning against the prevalent assumption that a ho listic, “closed” worldview will prevent those who hold it from tr eating nature as a means to an end. With the Renaissance, and the disc overy of the “New World”, important shifts occurred nevertheless. The European discovery of America placed all of creation on a shared “terraqueous globe”. This challenged representations of cosmological “ spheres” and habitable “climates”—the torrid zone morphing into t he tropical, for example—and raised questions about the status of “exotic”& nbsp;natures. An emphasis on pharmacology, breeding and mining in Euro peans’ interactions with their new possessions turned nature into a st orehouse of resources and forces to be extracted and harnessed to prod uce surplus and promote “civilization”. Whether this constituted a spe cial European path towards the “death of nature” (Carolyn Merchant), o r whether we are dealing rather with global interactions that had cumulative effects, is a question the school will explore.


On the one hand, there is little doubt that with Enlightenment appli cations of Baconian science new economics of trade, manufacturing and  plantation capitalism were legitimized in articulations of political e conomy and the “economy of nature”. Since then, the life sciences have been Janus-faced in their approach. The economy of nature was ce ntred on (certain kinds of) humans as beneficiaries of mastery over na tural resources, which crucially included the gendered household as the ultimate reproductive unit and physical labour by enslaved and waged workers. Projects to optimize the use of these resources through survey, incentivization and control form the core of political e conomy, and knowledge of natural resources was key to their success. I n this context, other species and other cultures were always at risk o f being reduced to means (or obstacles) to a politico-economic end, wh ich also included other classes’ and cultures’ knowledge of plant s and animals. Economic botany and zoology in the nineteenth century, and “ethnosciences” in the twentieth, testify to the intense attention European naturalists paid to this knowledge, notwithstanding the ir widespread contempt for “primitive” cultures.


On the other h and, the economy of nature was increasingly described as a complex web of fragile symbiotic relations among sentient beings that was in need of constant readjustment through adaptation. Especially with Malthusi anism, extinction became a real possibility, and nineteenth-century na turalists not only noted the devastating effects of industrialization and plantation economies on local floras and faunas, but also turned t hem into paradigms of dynamic ecologies at a planetary scale. The “sword of extinction” (Charles Lyell) wielded by European colonizers, especially against traditional lifeways of supposedly “primitive race s”, anthropomorphized nature in its epic “struggle for life” and raised the spectre of “vanishing tribes” and calls for “salvage anthro pology”. Ironically, “the Other” often emerged as a model for a h ealthy and sustainable life in “harmony” with nature. Such moves probl ematically associated racialized others with closeness to nature, and& nbsp;intimate knowledge of it, while at the same time asserting European su periority on the march towards civilization. The “savage mind”, as a m entality to be governed, an obstacle to overcome, and an occasion to r eflect critically upon one’s own position in the world, emerged as a p owerful imaginary.


These trends of the nineteenth century were reinforced in the twentieth. Marine biology, microbiology and parasito logy, in conjunction with the atmospheric and oceanic sciences, p ainted increasingly systemic pictures of life on earth; local ecosyste ms with their cyclical flows of matter and energy and fluctuations in& nbsp;population numbers were scrutinized and modelled in great detail. While industrialization was celebrated for its achievement of mastery  ;over nature, and modernization theorists denigrated non-industrial fo rms of life as doomed to die out, ever louder voices were raised again st human pollution of the planet. Projects of population control came out of conservation and environmentalist movements, but these hav e since the 1970s also become critical of the colonialist practices th is promoted. Rather than a given, nature was increasingly seen as needing care and protection from human interference. With growing rec ognition of the anthropogenic climate crisis, it has become ever clearer that environmental justice and reproductive justice must go ha nd in hand. For those humans who have polluted the most are not those& nbsp;bearing the brunt of rising temperatures, changing weather patterns or  environmental degradation. If the anthropocene discourse may have cha nged one thing, it is perhaps the realisation that the places of humans in nature, and their obligations to nature, are plural, and hen ce a matter of choices we make. But even that we suggest taking a s a question that is open to historical investigation.


The summer school will explore these ambiguities, not only to understand  better the past of the anthropocene, but also to develop perspectives for t he future by exposing options from the past. Without neglecting t he crucial role that dichotomies of modern and premodern, or “the West and the Rest”, have had in structuring past discourses and polit ical action, we thus plan to question such frameworks in order to achi eve an understanding of the human condition that might contribute to&n bsp;reflection on the current crisis.

Programme
The school starts with registration and a reception on the afternoon of Sunday 30 June, and ends after dinner the following Saturday night. Depa rture is on Sunday 7 July. Lectures last for up to 30 minute s in one-hour slots, leaving at least 30 minutes for discussion. Semin ars focus on pre-circulated texts. Groups of students will prepare eac h one with the seminar leader.

Rebecca Flemmin g
Lecture: Humans in ancient nature: Order and openness
Seminar: Human and non-human animals in the ancient world: Natures of exploitation

Pietro Daniel Omodeo
Lecture: Epistemology of water management in early-modern Venice
Seminar: Environmental history of Venetian hydrology in the longue durée

Suman Seth
Lecture: Medicine and the problems o f race
Seminar: Race, seasoning and strangeness

Sad iah Qureshi
Lecture: Extinction and empire in the Anthropocen e
Seminar: Hope, and the future of extinction

Chris tophe Bonneuil
Lecture: TBA
Seminar: TBA

Amanda Rees
Lecture: How do animals make us human?
S eminar: Imagining beasts in the post-human futures

Laura Martin
Lecture: Designing wildness
Seminar: Afterlives< br />
Jia Hui Lee
Lecture: The rat: Humanit y’s evil twin?
Seminar: Rodents as actors and metaphors

Cost
There is a fee for students of €400 each, which covers hotel accommodation and all meals for the week. Students  ;also need to pay for their own travel to Ischia. The directors w ill consider requests to waive the fee for accepted students unable to raise the money themselves, when supported by a detailed financial stateme nt and a letter from their department head.

Ap plications
Applications should be sent by email to <Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abili tare JavaScript per vederlo.> and should include, p lease:

The deadline for applicat ions is midnight CET on 28 February and applican ts will be notified of the outcome by 15 March 2024.

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