Applications now open
Welcome to the recruitment portal for a graduate cluster in environmental history that will enroll its first students in Fall 2025. This program is led by nearly a dozen professors who specialize in environmental history. This graduate cluster will train students in the methods and approaches historians use to understand the non-human world and its interactions and intersections with human-generated systems, societies and cultures. During their training at Indiana University-Bloomington graduate students will engage with broad themes in environmental history (agricultural production, animals, climate, disease, digital methods, economics, policy, environmental justice, etc.) as they select from intensive period- and place-specific courses exploring environmental, ecological and biological phenomena in the past.
The research expertise of faculty in the History Department spans the globe, and ranges from the Ancient World through the twenty-first century. Indiana University-Bloomington is currently promoting new and exciting collaborations in the environmental humanities and environmental studies, law, and policy. Faculty and students in History engage in campus partnerships with several long-standing programs, including the Ostrom Workshop’s Program on Environment and Natural Resource Governance and Food and Agrarian Systems Seminars, and the Environmental Resilience Institute, as well as regionally-specific research centers including the East Asian Studies Center, the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society, and the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute.
Cluster students will benefit from a cohort recruited to study environmental history, and will share in coursework, faculty advising, campus partnerships and the formation of connections with wider networks and institutions in the growing field of environmental humanities at Indiana University-Bloomington. In the process, they will acquire the skills they need to conduct cutting-edge research on environmental history topics, refine how to communicate their research to a variety of audiences and constituencies, and gain practical familiarity with research networks and funding mechanisms that bridge the social and natural sciences and the humanities. In summary: the cluster empowers students to study the complex relationship between humans and the environment from a wide variety of perspectives. Upon completion of the program, students will be fully equipped for careers in a variety of professions, not only in the academy, but in government and non-profit institutions.
The College of Arts + Sciences