Center for Public History to host energy workshop in Munich

(Deutsches Museum, Munich)

Follow-up to National Science Foundation-funded 2010 workshop planned

The Center for Public History has reached an agreement with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany to jointly convene a workshop entitled Energy Resources: Europe and Its Former Colonies at the Deutsches Museum in Munich during Fall 2012.

The workshop will recruit participants from around the world. The presenters include the College’s Martin Melosi, Distinguished University Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History; Joseph Pratt, the Cullen Professor of History and Business in the Department of History and Kairn Klieman, associate professor in the Department of History. Some of the institutions that have confirmed attendance are Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; the University of Sussex in England; the University of Cape Coast in Ghana; and Old Dominion in Norfolk, Va.

The workshop addresses historical perspectives on the relationship between European nations and their former colonies with respect to:

• the exploitation of energy resources,
• European influences on the development of energy industries in the former colonies,
• the environmental implications of energy resource development,
• questions of technology transfer and the transformation of knowledge through energy development,
• and the postcolonial dimensions of energy resources in a global perspective.

The 2012 program follows the successful workshop, Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence held in May 2010, at the University of Houston. That conference explored the energy-led development in cities across the world that is driving infrastructure improvements, influencing educational institutions and shaping labor markets, while also presenting environmental quality and public health challenges.

(Oil Spills World Map)

Since 1984, the Center for Public History at the University of Houston has been a leader in the field of public history in Houston, Texas, and the United States. Building on its faculty members’ international reputations in the fields of energy history and environmental history, the Center has become a leading program for research at the intersection of these fields in the United States and abroad.

The Rachel Carson Center is a joint initiative of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Deutsches Museum. Supported by the German Ministry of Research and Education, its goal is to further research and discussion in the field of international environmental studies and to strengthen the role of the humanities in political and scientific debates about the environment.