Violent Waters Environmental Politics in Early Modern England
Thursday 5 November 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
How were environments and politics remade by sovereigns, floods, mapmakers, migrants, rioters, and writers during wetland improvement projects in early modern England?
Violent Waters examines flagship ventures which promised to transform unruly fenland fringes into orderly terrain at the heart of national power and productivity.
Dr Elly Robson Dezateux is a post-doctoral fellow at Christ Church College. She is a historian of early modern Britain and the Atlantic world, with expertise in public history, environmental history, and legacies of colonialism.
Violent Waters is her first monograph book and will be discussed by:
Professor Paul Warde (History, Cambridge), historian of environmental and economic thought and author of major works including The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny 1500-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Professor Katherine Ibbett (Modern Languages, Oxford), professor of French now finishing a third book on river writing in seventeenth-century France and its territories.
Dr Tom Johnson (History, Oxford), associate professor and tutorial fellow in Medieval History and author of Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2020).
