The MINESCAPES Working Group brings together scholars across disciplines, regions, and historical periods to explore the histories and afterlives of mining and extraction. Focusing on the material, epistemic, and ecological dimensions of mining, the group provides a forum for works-in-progress, methodological exchange, and collaborative engagement. Spanning a range of disciplinary approaches, the group centers mining as a complex site of labor, knowledge production, and environmental transformation. This group is open to all and meets monthly during the academic year to discuss pre-circulated papers.

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Consortium Respectful Behavior Policy 

Upcoming Meetings

Monday, January 12, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EST

Presenter: Laith Shakir (New York University) 

Title: "Aeriel Photography, Oil, and Archaeology in the Interwar Middle East"

Abstract: In the period between the two world wars, the post-Ottoman Middle East witnessed a measurable increase in two forms of subterranean engagement: archeological excavation and petroleum exploration. Historians of each field science have tended to study them in isolation from one another. However, using the archives of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) and the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), I argue that the histories of these two field sciences are intimately linked. This paper examines how oil companies embraced aerial surveying—a novel technique refined during World War I and later adopted by archaeologists and geologists alike—across their operations in the Middle East. Using aerial photography, the APOC and IPC surveyed the region’s landscape to chart out routes for railways, roads, and pipelines and to identify potential sites for oil extraction. By focusing on the IPC’s support of two archaeological expeditions—the 1937 Wakefield Expedition to the Hadhramaut and Aurel Stein’s 1938-9 aerial surveys of the Roman limes in Iraq and Transjordan—I show how the field sciences of petroleum geology and archaeology were entangled with one another and with the British Empire’s political and economic designs for the region more broadly. Though seemingly counterintuitive, these entanglements also reveal how scientists took to the air to better understand the subterranean world decades before the widespread embrace of satellite imagery and other, more familiar, remote sensing techniques. 

 

 

Monday, February 9, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EST

Anna Graber (University of Minnesota), TBA

Monday, March 9, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

TBA

Monday, April 13, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

TBA

Monday, May 11, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

TBA

Past Meetings

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New Approaches in Mining Studies

Timothy James LeCain (Montana): Do Coal and Oil Drive History? The New Materialism and the Question of Mineral Agency

In recent years, as the new materialism, more-than-human history, and other theoretical and methodological innovations have gained influence, scholars have begun to rethink the potential agency of minerals. Conventional anthropocentric histories have generally viewed minerals as largely passive objects that human beings extract, process, and use. More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that we must consider that minerals have certain material natures and potentials—what James Gibson termed “affordances”—that exercise significant influences over how humans feel, think, and act. This potentiality has become a matter of especial concern regarding the two most significant climate-warming minerals, coal and oil. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously, and controversially, asserted in 2009 that, “The mansions of modern freedom stand on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.” Other scholars have probed the nature of carbon itself—the element that gives coal and oil their energetic potential—suggesting that humans have been lured and trapped into close relationship with these minerals that they cannot easily escape. Others disagree, arguing that such readings are mistakenly deterministic and thus neglect the true anthropocentric causes of global warming, such as colonialism or capitalism. In this talk, I argue that these debates over mineral agency and determinism are really debates about whether human cognition and culture exist primarily in our brains, or whether they extend out into the world around us. I conclude that the second may be the more convincing stance, and if so, there is a strong case that coal and oil should stand alongside of humans as central drivers of history.

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Collaborative Research on Mining I: Roundtable with Pamela Smith & Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert 

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert (McGill University): Historical research within the field of contemporary extractivist politics: observations from collaborations in Mexico, Panama, and Québec.  

This presentation focuses on the political dimensions of collaborative research in the history of mining, and extractivism more broadly. For people and territories facing the incursions of mining, hydroelectric, or logging projects, contemporary extractivism generates intense fields of political debate and action. What are the possible contributions of university-based historical research to these fields? Conversely, how can the collaborative mode reconfigure the agendas, methods, and creations of conventional research? Three projects undertaken with social movements and Indigenous communities in Mexico, Panama, and Québec offer some observations on the practice, challenges, and possibilities of this mode of research.

Dimitrios Mitsopoulos (Columbia University) & Jennifer Amaya (Columbia Climate School): Remains in the Minescape: Education about Lead in Lavrion, Greece

This collaborative project aims to increase public awareness of lead contamination in Lavrion, Greece, where the cumulative effects of 5000+ years of silver mining have been mapped by geo-chemists and are known in some detail, however public knowledge of the high levels of lead pollution has lagged behind. The project includes an environmental chemist, a historian, doctoral students in history and geochemistry and teachers of history and chemistry at a local secondary school. The teachers and grad students are preparing lesson plans about the local history which will be combined with soil testing for lead with a portable kit. The student testing, which will be carried out in Spring 2026, builds on previous projects in Peru and Germany.

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Welcome to the Minescapes Working Group!  

Welcome and Introduction by Conveners

Presentations: 

  • Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum) and Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University): Minescapes: Socio-natural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge

    This presentation introduces the MINESCAPES project, which investigates mining landscapes as socio-natural sites shaped by centuries of human-environment interaction. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between natural sciences and humanities, the project examines the "archives of nature and culture"—from soils, water, and vegetation to historical maps, manuscripts, and material objects. Integrating material landscape analysis, scientific methods, and archival research in a longue durée perspective, MINESCAPES illuminates how extractive practices have fundamentally reconfigured ecosystems and societies across millennia. By transcending established nature-culture dichotomies, this methodology yields historical insights critical for understanding contemporary debates on resource extraction, sustainability, and climate change. 

  • Deren Ertas and Jordan Howell: Brief explanation of the Call for Papers

Question & Answer

Group Conveners

Tina Asmussen

Tina Asmussen (PhD, University of Lucerne) is Professor in the History Department at Ruhr University Bochum and Head of the Mining History Research Section at the German Mining Museum in Bochum. Before joining Bochum, she served as Assistant Professor at the Chair of Science Studies at ETH Zurich (2017–20) and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2014–17). Her first book, Scientia Kircheriana: Die Fabrikation des Wissens bei Athanasius Kircher (Didymos-Verlag, 2016), examined how Kircherian knowledge was produced, circulated, and legitimized through scholarly, patronage, and Jesuit networks, highlighting the interplay between scholarly practices, material culture, and institutional contexts. Her current research focuses on the history of early modern mining and georesources, approached as an environmental and economic history of knowledge.

 

Deren Ertas

Deren Ertaş is a Ph.D. candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “An Empire of Metals: The Political Economy and Ecology of Ottoman Mining, 1720–1830” (working title), investigates the fiscal, legal, and logistical infrastructures that sustained copper, silver, gold, and lead extraction in Eastern Asia Minor. It examines how mining became a key site in the formation of Ottoman state capitalism by mobilizing capital, labor, and infrastructure to pursue imperial revenue. In addition to writing her dissertation, Deren is developing an interactive map of mining sites across the Ottoman Empire up to 1850.

 

Jordan Howell

Jordan Howell is a historian of the United States and the world, with a focus on corporations, empire, and labor. He's currently finishing his first book, Imperial Crucible: Building and Battling the Aluminum Company of America, 1888-1962, under contract with Columbia University Press. His dissertation on Alcoa was a finalist for the Krooss and Nevins prizes. His writing on bauxite mining has appeared in Environmental History and a summary of his dissertation can be found in Enterprise & Society. His next project is a global history of American multinationals, beginning with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, founded in 1848.

 

Pamela Smith

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org). Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. She led the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France (2020) and its open access research and teaching resources, the Research and Teaching Companion for instructors and students wishing to integrate hands-on lessons into teaching and learning, and an open source and customizable publishing tool, EditionCrafter, which allows users to publish digital editions as feature-rich and sustainable static sites. She is now working on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.

 

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