Date/Time
Thursday
15 Mar 2018
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Deborah Coen
Professor of History, Yale University

Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. This presentation will examine the origins of this multiscalar, multicausal framework in the nineteenth century, well before the advent of computers and satellites. It will situate these innovations within the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. And it will suggest that the history of modern climate science can productively be written as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world.