Research Summary

On the one hand, I am interested in questions of methodology: how to combine the evidence coming from the natural sciences and the humanities when studying highly literate and complex societies that developed in Eurasia over the last 3,000 years. This poses major practical and theoretiacal challenges, and overcoming them requires both refinement of existing methods and critical philosophical explorations. On the other hand, I am interested in concrete historical questions that deal with past social-ecological systems. How did the fragmentation/disintegration of the Roman global system at the end of Antiquity affect ecosystems across the Mediterranean and the well-being of individual, ordinary people? What was the actual role of climatic variability in historical developments and culture? What constitutes resilience to environmental stress in complex socities and how can we learn from the experience of the past to cope with the looming crisis of the Anthropocene? Is the challenge we are facing something new, or in some way it reiterates the tensions and structural tendencies present in past complex social-ecological systems? More broadly, in these contexts, I reflect on the role that narrating history (telling stories) has to play in the post-modern Anthropocene societies, as a source of both hope and critical, realistic thinking.