Participants

Mu Cao is a Chinese historian whose research interest is in Chinese environmental history, and urban environmental history in particular. She previously carried out research on river pollution in Northeast China, during which she noticed the severe water problems in Chinese cities and their influence on the neighboring environment. It was then that her focus turned to urban environmental history. Her recent works focus on the problems associated with the use and discharge of urban water. She aims to explore modernization processes in Chinese cities and their influence on water issues, as well as the relationship among human beings, the city, and nature. Her project at the Rachel Carson Center addresses the changing water supply and drainage system of modern Tianjin. Mu obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2007, her master’s degree in 2010, and a doctorate in History in 2015 from Nankai University. She also studied environmental history at the University of Kansas from 2011 to 2012. She currently works as a lecturer in the College of History and Culture at Tianjin Normal University.

Bruno Capilé did his undergraduate study in Biology and taught science and biology at general schools after graduation. When he saw the advantages of the history of science for teaching, he was dazzled with its methodology and historiographical questions. He did a master’s degree in the history of science Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and he was able to work on the history of cartography at the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences (MAST), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 2010 to 2014. He got to know Lise Sedrez through the Laboratory of History and Nature (LABHEN), and since then Lise has guided him in his doctoral thesis on the many rivers of Rio de Janeiro. He returned to MAST in 2018 after his doctoral study. His research interest mainly lies in urban environmental history, particularly the history of urban rivers from the perspectives of science and cartography.

Young Rae Choi is an assistant professor of Geography in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Her research interrogates the complexity and interwovenness of development and conservation in marine and coastal governance of East Asia. Previously, she was a research scientist at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology where she worked on marine policy and strategic planning of ocean science research. She also led the Korean side of the Worldwide Fund for Nature Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project as a national conservation coordinator. She is currently working on a book on the modern history of the Yellow Sea.

Christopher Courtney is an environmental and social historian of modern China. Having completed his Ph.D. at Manchester, he held research and teaching posts at the University of Cambridge, National University of Singapore and the University of Southampton. In 2018 he was appointed as Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Durham University. Specializing in the history of disasters, he has published on a variety of topics including popular religion, Maoist disaster governance, and the history of urban fire. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a history of extreme heat in modern China cities, as part of a Singapore Ministry of Education funded a multidisciplinary project entitled Heat in Modern Asia: Past, Present and Future.

Shripad Dharmadhikary is an activist and researcher working on analysis and advocacy of water and energy issues. He is a graduate in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay and was a full-time activist with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the mass movement of people affected by the dams on Narmada river, for 12 years. Subsequently, he founded Manthan Adhyayan Kendra that does analytical and advocacy work in the water sector, and which he now coordinates. His focus is on contributing to shifting the water sector in the county towards a more equitable, just and sustainable path. He has close links with grassroots groups and campaigns.

Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University).  He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90),  on the political platform of the All India Student’s Federation.

He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley), besides having had visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University).  He holds honorary affiliation as  Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short Term Chair at the University of Tokyo ( Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies.

He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and the joint editor of   The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011). He has also edited the  Environment, Technology, and Development: Critical and Subversive essays (2012) for the Economic and Political Weekly Series. His research interests and publications cover themes in environmental history, political ecology, sustainable development, and modern technology.

Yan Gao is a historian of late imperial and modern China and works at the juncture of social and environmental history. She grew up in Wuhan of Central China, a place where people need to live with extensive water-related issues and problems, and that living experience became the original incentives for her to investigate the history of water control in China. After spending a few years studying World History in China, she came to the U.S. for doctorate studies in Chinese history. She obtained her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and taught at a few institutions around the world, including Qatar, Bangladesh, and Memphis, TN.  In 2016, she spent seven months in Germany at the Rachel Carson Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München on the Carson fellowship, indulging herself in the field of environmental history and environmental humanities in general. Earlier this year, she spent a month at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for a Local Gazetteers project.

David P Gilmartin received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University.  His recent publications include Civilization and Modernity: Narrating the Creation of Pakistan (Yoda Press, 2014) and Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (California, 2015).  He is interested in the intersections of law, politics, and environmental history.  He is a co-editor of a forthcoming edited volume (with Pamela Price and Arild Ruud) entitled South Asian Sovereignty:  The Conundrum of Worldly Authority (Routledge, forthcoming 2019).

Scott Moore is a political scientist whose interests center on environmental sustainability, technology, and international relations.  His first book, Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines how climate change and other pressures affect the likelihood of conflict over water within countries. At Penn, Scott is Director of the Penn Global China Program. Previously, Scott was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change. Prior to entering public service, Scott was Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Scott’s research and commentary on a wide range of environmental and international affairs issues has appeared in a range of leading scholarly journals and media outlets, including Nature, The China Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times. Scott holds doctoral and master’s degrees from Oxford University and an undergraduate degree from Princeton.  He is a Truman, Fulbright, and Rhodes Scholar.

Lise Sedrez (Ph.D. in Latin American History) is an environmental historian at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She has worked and published in the USA and Brazil and is the co-editor of the series Latin American Landscapes. Professor Sedrez’s research interests include urban environmental history and the history of disasters. She is co-editor with S. Ravi Rajan of The Great Convergence: Environmental histories of BRICS (2018).

Sudipta Sen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. A scholar of India and the British Empire, his work has focused on the early colonial history of British India. He is the author of two books, Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002). He is currently working on two book-length manuscripts. The first, Ganga: Many Pasts of an Indian River (New Haven: Yale University Press; forthcoming) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, historical geography and ecology, and the other is a longer-term project entitled Empire of Law and Order: Crime, Punishment and Justice in Early British India, 1770-1830.

Eugene Simonov is environmental scientist and activist residing in China, International Coordinator of the Rivers without Boundaries Coalition (RwB) focusing on North Eurasia transboundary rivers. He cooperated with WWF Amur Programme to assist comprehensive assessment of environmental and social consequences of many hydropower projects and designed methodology for basin-wide environmental impact assessment of hydropower and analysis of hydropower role in flood management.

Simonov also is one of the secretaries of the “Green Silk Road” Initiative of CSOs and experts from many regions that analyzes possible social and environmental consequences of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and develops adequate early response strategy to major changes in development patterns on the Eurasian continent. He works on securing rights and venues for public participation in the BRI countries where civil activists and independent experts are being oppressed. “Green Silk Road” Initiative members adopted and publicized GSR “Declaration”(see greensilkroad.net/). Eugene Simonov also works as research staff for trilateral “Dauria” International Protected Area and Sino-Russian Expert Committee on Biodiversity and Protected Areas. Dr. Simonov has more than 60 research publications (at least  25 of those peer-reviewed), published in English, Russian and Chinese. (See https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eugene_Simonov )

Renzo Taddei is a professor of anthropology and environmental studies at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has earned his doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University. Dr. Taddei has served as visiting a professor at Yale University and at Duke University, and is a research associate at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, at Columbia University. He is also assistant director of the Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study, a research institution placed in New York City, where he leads the ethnographic education program. Dr. Taddei has written extensively on environmental conflicts and traditional environmental knowledge in South America.

Qian Zhu is a historian of modern China and a theorist of everyday life. Her research is on the intellectual history of China since the late 19th century onwards. She is particularly interested in how Chinese non-Marxist leftists understood everyday life and conceptualized it in regards of human emancipation, modernization, democracy and mass politics in the early 20th century. Beyond her specific field of modern China, she is working through feminism and gender, cultural politics, the theory of everyday life, urban studies and labor history. Her second book project in particular looks into coal and fuel culture that emerged in China in the 20th century and how it relates to workplace safety, occupational disease control, and the popular education of coal and fuel industry.

Zhaoqing Han is a professor at the Center for Historical Geographic Studies of Fudan University in China. She received her bachelor of science degree in Geography from Nangjing University and her PhD in History from Fudan University. She worked at Harvard University from 2000 to 2001 and Yale University from 2010 to 2011 as a visiting scholar. Her research explores the historical physical geography of China. She has written papers on climate change in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and on changes in the lower reaches of the Yellow River and its effects on the landscape of the North China Plain. Currently, her research focuses primarily on the history of cartography in China, and the relationship between human activities and the environmental evolution of western China over the past 600 years.