Theme description HIS115

Course responsible: Marcus Colla

Historians have always been interested in time. After all, time is the historian’s stock in trade; it is the very substance of their subject. In 1943, the French historian Marc Bloch observed that time is the ‘very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’. He argued that historians ought to distinguish between ‘time as a mere abstraction’ and ‘historical time’, between time as something measured by clocks and calendars and time as something experienced, qualitative, contingent and variable. Time, as Bloch saw it, was not simply something in which history took place, but something that history produced. 

This course takes up Bloch’s challenge. It interrogates some of the innovative approaches to the history of time that historians of the modern world have developed. Indeed, the course is deliberately designed to be ‘timely’: in recent years, the history of time and temporality has become a flourishing area, even leading some historians to speak of a ‘temporal turn’ in the discipline. Drawing on some of the latest research in the field, the course will explore themes such as ‘The Politics of Time’, ‘Time, Physics, and Philosophy’, ‘Revolutionary Time’, ‘Time and the Environment’, ‘Time and Gender’, ‘Time and the Environment’, ‘Histories of the Future’ and ‘Nostalgia’. In so doing, we will pose a number of fundamental questions about the importance of time and temporality in the history of Modern History. How have modern societies articulated their relationships to the past and the future? How have experiences of time been shaped by changes in technology, work and politics? How has time been used as an instrument of control? How have intellectuals theorised and thought about time? 

Furthermore, the course also addresses some bigger questions about contemporary historiography. How might the study of time be productively linked up to fields such as Postcolonial History, Global History, the History of Emotions, the History of Space, ‘deep time’ and the Anthropocene? Does an understanding of the history of time demand an interdisciplinary perspective? And is the history of ‘time’, for all that, really new? 

This course explores how people have understood, shaped, and contested the natural world from the early industrial era to the present day. Blending history, environmental studies, and political thought, it examines key movements in environmentalism—including conservation, preservation, ecological science, and climate activism—while analyzing how these ideas have intersected with power, identity, and inequality. Rather than presenting environmentalism as a single narrative, the course highlights it as a global, contested, and evolving phenomenon shaped by colonialism, industrialization, and social struggle. Students will investigate who has defined “nature,” who has benefited from environmental policies, and who has been excluded or harmed. 

Designed as an active, participatory experience, History of Environmentalism emphasizes team-based discussion, collaborative analysis, and immersive role-playing games. Students will step into historical debates and international negotiations, practicing public speaking, persuasive writing, and group strategy along the way. This is a course for those ready to engage, question, and contribute—not sit back and take notes.