Call for Proposals
Special Issue of Contemporanea: Water, Power, and Politics in Environmental History
Deadline: June 15, 2020
Environmental history is a well-established subfield in historiography. It intersects multiple areas of investigation, and combines diverse methodological approaches. The renewed centrality of environmental questions in the public arena renders the study of environment and society at large, and therefore also in history, even more relevant. For all these reasons Contemporanea, a journal specializing in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will devote a special issue to environmental history.
This special issue of Contemporanea will focus on the political dimensions of water in contemporary history. Water occupies an important place in environmental history scholarship. Water systems are central to the construction and reproduction of human societies and, therefore, shed light on issues ranging from modes of production to available technologies, from competition and control of natural systems to the role of institutions and administrative systems, and more. This special issue of Contemporanea aims to put water politics, power, and institutions at the center of the historical analysis and to question once again their significance in the environmental history of water.
Contemporanea thus invites environmental and water historians to submit proposals on political and institutional dimensions of the history of water in any geographical region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Historical forms of ownership of water bodies
- Governance and administrations of water bodies
- Law and court cases on water bodies
- Conflicts of appropriations and use of water bodies
- Water bodies and warfare
- Knowledge and governance of water systems
- Inter- and transnational diplomacy of water bodies
- Politics of pollution and contamination
Please send a 400-word abstract in English along with a 2-page C.V. of the author(s) to guest editors Simone Neri Serneri and Giacomo Parrinello as well as to the managing editor (contemporanea@mulino.it) by June 15, 2020. We aim to inform applicants of the selection results by July 15, 2020. Selected authors will have to submit their final version of the article for double-blind peer review by April 30, 2021. Articles must be written in English and have a length between 10,000 and 12,000 words inclusive of references. We expect the special issue to be published by April/June 2022.
For further information on Contemporanea please see the journal’s website.
For any questions, please contact Giacomo Parrinello.
