Edward Schoolman: Climate, environment, and society in the premodern Mediterranean – Exploring the intersections between people and landscapes through interdisciplinary approaches
Title
Climate, environment, and society in the premodern Mediterranean –Exploring the intersections between people and landscapes through interdisciplinary approaches
Mentor
Department
Biosketch
I am a historian of the late antique and medieval world with a focus on Italy and the Mediterranean from the 6th century to the 11th century. While my current research is based on textual sources (charters and narratives), and their intersection with paleoenvironmental and climate records, my background was in archaeological and I still gravitate towards objects, places and their contexts. My teaching covers a range of course, covering the periods from beginning of the Roman Mediterranean to the High Middle Ages, new offerings in (premodern) environmental history.
My main research is focused on the intersections of land management, climate, and environment made visible through medieval historical records and paleoecological data (in collaboration with Scott Mensing and Adam Csank in University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno’s geography department, Gianluca Piovesan at the University of Tuscia, and Annamaria Pazienza, a former Marie-Curie Global Fellow at the University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno (2021-2023) and at Ca’ Foscari in Venice. By combining different kinds of data about the past landscapes and their exploitation, our research has been able to demonstrate the impacts of shifting economic and political priorities on the environment over the past 2000 years.
Research on these projects has been supported by fellowships at the University of Padova, the University of Tübingen’s Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages research group, and the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies, and a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Project overview
This project will seek to explore a number of questions, including: How did past societies manage complex landscapes? How did they deal with climate change? How do we balance data from historical (both written and archaeological) and natural archives? This project seeks to collate and analyze the range of evidence that helps modern historians and scientists reconstruct past landscapes and climate, and our current understanding of the many drivers of environmental change. In studying historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological records and archives, we seek to discover the ways in which communities survived the political disintegration of the Roman Empire and took advantage of climate change during the Medieval Warming Period, how past landscapes responded to the Little Ice Age and the Black Death, and more generally the interrelationship between climate, environment, and past societies. While these trends are global in nature, the project will be bound by the greater Mediterranean from 400-1500 C.E., where the records of fossil pollens and written documents allow for detailed analysis within narrow timeframes, and will focus on the resiliency of local communities.
While there are no prerequisites for PREP students, the expectation is for an interest in interdisciplinary research. The main areas of focus will be on paleoecology and history, but also including climate, demography, and archaeology, and the student will develop skills in reading and interpreting different types of archives (fossil pollen diagrams, historical chronicles, archaeological field survey reports), as well as working collaboratively. Learning outcomes will include the ability to analyze and interpret historical and scientific research on the past environment through discussions and written reports; to explain various aspects of environmental and ecological history during the Middle Ages; to synthesize, analyze, and convey complex historical information by means of and independent research project or co-written paper.
Pack Research Experience Program information and application