Science, politics and environmental transformations
I've just returned from a few weeks in Mauritius, where I was lucky enough to spend some time both exploring the archives and exploring the island, to follow-up on and deepen my engagement with the island's meteorological history. I started working on the history of meteorology in Mauritius by following Albert Walter, founding director of … Continue reading Mauritius – notes from the archives
Georgina Endfield and I have just published a review paper in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change on the topic of 'climate & colonialism'. The paper seeks to take in a large volume of recent(and not-so-recent) research in two broad areas: the links between ideas about climate (such as tropical degeneracy) and ideologies of imperialism; and more … Continue reading Climate & Colonialism: new paper in ‘WIREs Climate Change’
I'm delighted to announce the publication of a themed issue of the journal History of Meteorology edited by myself and Angelo Matteo Caglioti (EUI), on the topic of 'Relocating Meteorology'. The collection developed out of a conference session at the AAG annual meeting in 2015, and brings together a range of established and emerging voices in … Continue reading Relocating Meteorology: themed issue of History of Meteorology
A blog post about a recent special issue I contributed to on the the history of global environmental image-making…
We are happy to announce the publication of a special issue on global environmental images in the Open Collections of Geo: Geography and Environment. Sebastian Grevsmühl directed the special issue with papers by Birgit Schneider, Sabine Höhler, Hervé Regnauld and Patricia Limido, Martin Mahony, and Sebastian Grevsmühl. As the editorial introduction states, this issue was put together in order to stimulate a “sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images, paying close attention to the nature of this new type of global knowledge, the imaginaries mobilised, as well as the politics, power struggles, asymmetries and marginalisation processes which are inevitably involved when talking about the global environment.”
Framed as an interdisciplinary endeavour, it is probably no surprise that authors come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including physical and cultural geography, art history and media studies, history of science and environmental history. Thus, the subjects, periods and…
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Things have been a bit quiet on here over the last few weeks, and that's partly because as of 1st August I've moved to the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia to take up a position as Lecturer in Human Geography. Fortunately, my official title will be 'British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow … Continue reading New position at UEA
s I returned from my trip to Malaysia last week, complete with a suitcase full of print-outs from the archives and a head full of ideas about how the development of meteorology in British Malaya fits into the wider story I want to tell with this project. Most of my time in Malaysia was spent … Continue reading Malaysia – notes from the archives
Last week I was delighted to join a workshop at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum on the history of weather science and weather extremes in the region. The workshop brought together historians of science with atmospheric scientists interested in using historical observations to reconstruct past weather and climate. It was a great day of cross-disciplinary … Continue reading Hong Kong workshop: Weather Science, Extreme Weather and Disaster Histories
I was delighted to hear this week that my article 'For an empire of all types of climate': meteorology as an imperial science was placed in the 'highly commended' category for this year's Journal of Historical Geography essay prize, along with Dean Bond's Enlightenment geography in the study: A.F. Büsching, J.D. Michaelis and the place of geographical … Continue reading Commendations
In a few weeks' time I'll be heading over to Malaysia to spend some time in the archives there, as well as to visit the University of Nottingham's campus (UNMC) just outside Kuala Lumpur. I've got a few speaking engagements lined up during my trip, which will give me the opportunity to present some of … Continue reading Forthcoming speaking engagements in SE Asia
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the airship as a speculative technology, particularly its history as an imagined agent of imperial connectivity in interwar Britain. More broadly I’m interested in how meteorology was used in this period to make the atmosphere legible and traversable, and a lot of the motivation for the … Continue reading Thinking with airships
Martin Mahony 