April 22nd, 2021, 6pm PST
Organized by the UBC History Graduate Student Association, the Burge Lecture is an annual endowed lecture made possible by a generous donation from UBC alumnus William Burge. The Burge Lecture series provides students, faculty, alumni and community members the opportunity to connect with historians and scholars engaged in exciting research.
Migration and environmental change are two of the most pressing issues confronting the world—both processes are often followed by the word “crisis,” and increasingly they are connected in public discourse, through terms like “environmental refugee.” Yet the fields of migration history and environmental history have proceeded along parallel lines, with few points of intersection. This lecture begins by asking why that has been the case—and then aims to imagine what it would involve to connect environmental history and the history of migration in new ways, focusing on the history of the Indian Ocean–a part of the world where both historical processes have always been deeply connected.
