Forests have long stood at the center of environmental history, yet much of this rich scholarship has focused on forests, forestry, and deforestation as social and political phenomena. This working group redirects attention to forestry science and related disciplines as key lenses through which different societies have rendered forests knowable, governable, and exploitable globally. By examining practices such as fire management, entomology, pesticide use, inventorying, and data modelling in forests, the working group aims to explore and debate how knowledge on global forests has underpinned shifting regimes of resource extraction, conservation, and climate policy.
Renewing classic topics on forest management, conservation, and deforestation—as well as integrating works from anthropology, STS and political ecology that foreground Indigenous and local perspectives—the working group seeks to further reflect on how forestry science has shaped, and been shaped by, wider projects of state-building, empire, development, and global environmental governance. It will discuss forests as sites of experimentation and “laboratories” where new concepts of sustainability, biodiversity, and carbon cycling were forged, contested, and translated into policy.
The working group provides an institutional hub for global, interdisciplinary research on forestry science, connecting historians, STS scholars, and policymakers. Bringing together case studies from tropical and temperate regions, and from colonial to postcolonial contexts, we seek to compare how different knowledge traditions, institutions, and socio-political contexts have configured forest ecosystems over time. In doing so, the group aims not only to fill a significant gap in the historiography of forests, but also to inform debates on environmental governance, climate mitigation, and just transitions in contemporary era.
Group Conveners
Tomas Bartoletti
Tomás Bartoletti is a Senior Lecturer at the Chair for History of the Modern World of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He is currently Principal Investigator for the project "Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations, c. 1880-1980s: A Multispecies History of Global Capitalism", which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Tomás earned his PhD from the University of Buenos Aires and read Latin American Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and History of Science and Technology at the University of Quilmes (Argentina). He has held research positions as a Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (2025-2026), as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2021-2023), and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ETH Zürich (2019-2021). In Spring 2025, Tomás served as a Visiting Professor at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His work has been published in Isis, Journal of Global History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Global Intellectual History, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
Sophie FitzMaurice
Sophie FitzMaurice is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Magdalene College, Cambridge. She received her PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2023, where she wrote her dissertation on the environmental and material history of the US telegraph system. She is now turning that dissertation into a book, which is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Tania Munz
Tania Munz is the President & CEO of the Forest History Society. Before joining FHS in 2023, Tania served as the Chief Program Officer for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. There, she led the independent research center, which conducts work in areas spanning science, humanities, international affairs, and education. Previously, Tania served as Vice President for Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center and as Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library, where she oversaw the collections, public services, and scholarly programs. She has taught history of science and environmental history at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University and was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Tania holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University, a master's degree in the history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota, and a BA from the University of Chicago in the history of science and medicine. She authored the award-winning book The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Dance Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016).