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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Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.

Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.

Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.

Upcoming Meetings

Monday, October 13, 2025, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

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

Monday, November 10, 2025, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EST

Collaborative Research on Mining 

Monday, December 8, 2025, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EST

New Approaches to Mining

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

TBA

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

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

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. She examines how mining became a key site in the formation of Ottoman state capitalism, through the mobilization of capital, labor, and infrastructure in pursuit of imperial revenue. In addition to writing her dissertation, she 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.

 

53 Members

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