CEH supports the professional development of PhD students whose projects fall within the overall scope of the center. Affiliated PhD students have a wide range of projects, examples of which can be seen below. CEH also maintains lists of relevant PhD courses and also organizes its own courses which are published on this page and in the CEH newsletter.
Please note, the Centre for Environmental Humanities does not offer its own funding for PhD or post-doctoral positions. If you would like to become a PhD student at AU and join in CEH activities, you will first need to be employed by one of Aarhus University’s faculties. For PhD vacancies, please visit this page. For post-doctoral vacancies, please visit this page. We also host post-doctoral researchers who have their own funding via grants or fellowships.
Project: Ecological Globalisation. Anthropology of the New Pangaea
In Almería, in the south of Spain nested in between the Mediterranean and the mountains of Sierra Nevada, we find the world’s biggest assembly of greenhouses. Known as the ´Plastic Ocean´ to the locals, but more widely recognized as ‘The European Kitchen Garden’ as farmers here deliver fruits and vegetables to the European continent and beyond. The 30.000+ hectares of land is to a large degree small-scale and family runned farming consisting of 2-5 hectares tied up in cooperatives. Crops spans from a vast variety of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons, egg plants, beans, etc. and farmers tend to have two cycles of different crops.
The semi-arid area, along with the entire Iberian Peninsula, is destined to become the first European desert by 2070. This project is centered around how it is to live with climate in conventional intensive greenhouse production. Taking the view of the working farmers the project draws attention to the changes that are taking place in the view of the climatic and environmental crisis that the region and the planet is undergoing.
Project title: Climate Creation: Forms of Atmospheric Control
My project examines climate fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century. In a period of great climatic variability and atmospheric pollution (the ‘Great Stink’ from 1858, the global spread of the ash cloud from the volcano Krakatoa in 1883, etc.), works such as Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous (1889), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Begum Rokeya’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1908) begin to formalize fictive spaces in which humanity suspends meteorological volatility, tailoring the climate to suit its needs at a local, regional or planetary level.
In dialogue with 19th-century urban architecture and engineering (the practice of indoor heating began in the 1860s, the precursor to air-conditioning was debuted at Crystal Place, etc.), I want to show how writers, architects, and engineers of this period speculate on ways to create spheres (the underground, the greenhouse, the planet) where wind, rain, and sunshine could be rigorously regulated. Seeing the late 19th and early 20th century as a distinct time of climatic transition marked by rupture and continuity, break and duration, it appears as the epochal anamnesis of the Anthropocene, the literary works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Begum Rokeya, and others, written on the cusp of climate change, interrogating not only the possibility of climate disaster but also an ambivalent techno-futuristic need for installing globalized, mechanized systems of climate control. My project thus provides a cultural history of man-made climate.
The goal of the Junior Scholar Group is to create social and intellectual comeradory among students at AU interested in environmental humanities. The CEH Junior Scholar Group enacts this by providing an open space for AU students of any disciplinary background who are interested in the environmental humanities to come together and explore the disciplines diversity. The group operates free of oversight and organizes activities and events however it sees fit, such as reading groups, outings, film screenings, field trips, and weekly lunches together
If you would like to get involved or learn more, please contact ceh@cas.au.dk and we will put you into contact with the CEH Junior Scholar Group.
For an overview of other PhD courses available to all PhD students in Denmark, see Phd courses in Denmark
