Disease in Global Environmental History

Conference Programme

March 9-10, 2007

York University, Toronto, Ontario

Studies of disease in the past, environmental history, and globalization have been exploding in recent years. Disease has been examined as a transformative historical process that destabilizes societies and cause major population shifts through movements and deaths. Researchers in environmental history have connected such historic scourges as the Black Death and malaria to human and natural alterations of environmental conditions. Pathogenic disease is part of the natural world and is engaged in co-evolution with human beings. In historical time human cultural changes, such as agriculture, travel, pastoralism, state-building, urbanization, and colonialism, have changed the living conditions for microorganisms and their non-human hosts and vectors. Human individuals and communities have repeatedly been exposed to new diseases and to old ones with altered attributes or newly-expanded ranges. Other disease conditions, such as Minamata disease, many cancers, and beri-beri, result from physical or chemical qualities in the environment, often caused or altered by human actions. Environmental history explores this two-way relationship of humans and nature at the smallest scale of microbes and molecules as well as the largest scale of global climatic change and human migration. Globalization has encouraged scholars to look past political and geographic boundaries to see how these historical patterns can operate on large scales.

This two-day conference draws these frameworks together to study the relationships among diseases, human societies, and environments by focusing on three specific areas: 1. the preconditions and consequences of epidemic and endemic disease in historical context; 2. the roles played by migration of pathogens, vectors and people; and 3. new diseases in the globalizing world. The three themes will be explored through keynote speakers, paper panels, commentators, and general discussion.

The final conference programme is available as a Word document here.

For more information please visit the conference website http://www.yorku.ca/uhistory/envconf/index.htm