Time: June 11, 2026, 09:30—11:00
Venue: B206, Humanities Building, Tsinghua University
Theme: The Anthropocene and Global Environmental History: A Dialogue with Professor John R. McNeill
Guest Speaker: Professor John R. McNeill (Georgetown University, USA)
Discussion Partner: Associate Professor Shen Yubin (Department of the History of Science, Tsinghua University)
Event Profile:
This event will be held in the form of an academic dialogue, focusing on the "Anthropocene" and global environmental history. The dialogue will center on how environmental history understands the relationship between human activities and changes in the Earth system, how global environmental history addresses issues such as climate change, ecological crises and the Anthropocene, and what role history can play in interdisciplinary Anthropocene research. Combining Professor McNeill's long-term research on world environmental history in the 20th century, global environmental changes, war and ecology, disease and the environment, the event will further discuss the relationship between environmental history, global history, history of science and planetary-scale historical research.
This dialogue will help promote academic exchanges in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University in the fields of environmental history, Anthropocene research, and "planetary history of science", and also provide important inspiration for faculty and students to understand the relationship between global environmental changes and historical research.
Guest Profile:
Professor John R. McNeill, a renowned contemporary environmental historian and global historian, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy, and the Academy of Sciences of the Kingdom of Morocco. He currently serves as a University Distinguished Professor at Georgetown University in the United States. He has previously served as the president of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Environmental History. He is a member of the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. His representative works include *Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World*, *Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914*, and *The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945*, which have had a significant impact on the study of global environmental history and the Anthropocene.