Winner of the ESEH Tallinn Dissertation Prize 2021
Daniele Valisena Coal Lives: Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia Belgium 1945-1980, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Valisena has created a new “bottom-up” history as he takes us ‘geo-historical wayfaring’ through the coal landscapes of Wallonia. Beginning with the subterranean geology, he delineates a deep social history of place that is mobile and migratory, ever evolving. The Capitalocene and its predecessors are evident in the heritage of the material world: the terrils and waste dumps still colour the lives of the ‘daughters and sons and seeds of the coal age’ in the long post-coal future.
The writing is almost pointillist in style, drawing in theoretical perspectives as needed -- from environmental history, migration studies, more-than-human studies, and more. Valisena deftly takes the reader along the slippery pathway of the Great Acceleration in Wallonia. His story starts in 1945, but it also starts in the 12th century, and in the geological deep past, and it flows strongly into the future, shining light on our uncertain present.
Coal Lives: Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia Belgium 1945-1980 demonstrates how environmental history at its theoretically broadest can enhance public policy and decisions for the deep future. The dissertation reveals the centrality of this small slice of European history to the shape of Belgium, of Europe and of globalization of people and markets, while depicting the many layers of past landscapes and peoples that have forged its present urbanised world.
The Tallinn Prize Committee had a wonderful field of candidates for this prize. Congratulations to the winner, the finalists and all the other submissions. Together, you exemplified the breadth and richness of environmental history in and beyond Europe today. In the end our prize-winner was chosen because he models a next generation of history-writing that dances with the possibilities for environmental history when it includes theoretical perspectives from social history, from natural science and from public policy, and reaches out to an audience beyond the academy.
-2021 ESEH Tallinn Dissertation Prize Committee
Highly Commended Candidates
(in alphabetical order)
Melsted, Odinn Icelandic Energy Regimes: Fossil Fuels, Renewables, and the Making of a Low-carbon Energy Balance, 1940–1980, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
Meiske, Martin Die Geburt des Geoengineerings. Großbauprojekte in der Frühphase des Anthropozäns (The Birth of Geoengineering. Large-Scale Engineering Projects in the Early Stage of the Anthropocene), Deutsches Museum/ LMU Munich
Sekulić, Ana Conversion of the Landscape: Environment and Religious Politics in an Early Modern Ottoman Town, Princeton University, USA.
Daniele Valisena talks about his work with fellow ESEH member, Noémi Ujházy
More about the Tallinn Prize in 2021
The committee received 29 nominations for the prize. Nineteen of the dissertations were in English, 10 in other languages. The quality of all the dissertations was very high. All dissertations are now included in the ESEH Dissertation online database ( https://www.zotero.org/eseh-nextgate/library ).
While English was the majority language, it was not the mother tongue for most of authors. Their first languages included Hebrew, Greek, Swedish, German, Dutch, Turkish, Bosnian, Romanian, Lithuanian. Native knowledge of a language other than English was often crucial to historical language research (including, for example documents in Ottoman Turkish, Middle High German etc). Only four applicants were citizens in places where English is the first language. Portuguese (4) was the biggest non-English group. We also had German (2), French (1), Italian (1), Polish (1) and Hungarian (1). Every candidate provided a long abstract, specially drafted for the prize in English, to help shortlist among diverse candidates.
Principles of the Prize:
The prize is designed to reward an independent thinker and writer, a rising star in the field of environmental history. The central questions we started with for the ESEH Tallinn Prize 2021 were:
· Is the research question original?
· Are the sources innovative?
· Is the dissertation something that shows “what environmental history can do for the world”?
We remained open to a broad definition of what constitutes environmental history, diverse ways of doing it and diversity in the subjects and periods studied (details of these are available from ESEH). In addition, we considered how well candidates engaged with environmental history and cognate literature, their methods and approaches, and whether their abstracts had a clear and convincing argument/thesis statement.
Environmental historians make nature, the landscape or animals and plants the agents of action, not just the background to human history. The changing history of ideas is also relevant as it frames the ways historical actors understand nature. This was a strong element in many of the dissertations. Most candidates showed that they read secondary sources in environmental history, often alongside sources from many other disciplines, and a mastery of diverse primary sources – from medieval manuscripts, artwork and archives to databases from dendrochronology, vulcanology, and other technical sciences, as well as recent digital and modelling sources developed in the 21stcentury.
Our rising scholars showed remarkable initiative, integrating the growing body of environmental history with new directions and connections for the field. Disciplinary dexterity is incredibly important as future work as our new generation scholars may not end up in a traditional history department, or even at a university. Many showed brilliantly how they will bring environmental history disciplinary skills to whatever scholarship they are working on next.
The Prize reflects its European origins, but ESEH supports more than this
Not all the “research” areas in ESEH are captured by the Tallinn Dissertation Prize. We only considered final dissertations and from the sources named in the terms of the prize, that is, the combination of “European histories written anywhere in the world” and “Environmental histories of anywhere in the world written in a European university”.
Note that through NEXTGATe (early career) writing mentorships are also available to those working beyond these categories, and ESEH also supports these in other ways.
Socially, the category “Europe” creates biases, which is something the ESEH Diversity Committee is working to counter. While ASEH is working hard to build black histories (and the same is true in Australia and New Zealand), the dissertations presented to this prize in 2021 are very “white”. However, migrants and refugees have a very long history in Europe, and while European slavery is hard to research, the rise in climate and other environmental refugees arriving in Europe is leaving an impression on the field. There was one abstract that specifically referenced African slavery in Brazil in a European context. The shift away from emigration studies and international diaspora towards immigration and internal diaspora in Europe itself is a sign of our times, and of the importance of globalization and climate change in environmental history.
The 2021 ESEH Tallinn Prize Committee
Libby Robin (Chair, Australia), Onur Inal (Austria), Ana Isabel Queiroz (Portugal, who replaced Inês Amorim, who had to retire due to illness), Simone Schleper (Netherlands) and Dan Tamir (Switzerland).
The Tallinn Dissertation Prize
The Dissertation Prize aims to support early career environmental history scholars based in Europe or those based outside Europe but whose work contributes to European environmental history.
The Tallinn Dissertation Prize was established by the ESEH to reward innovative doctoral dissertations based on original research in European environmental history. The Prize was named after Tallinn, the city where it was awarded for the first time at the 10th ESEH Biennial Conference in 2019.