CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The Harz Mountains in Central Germany bear witness to more than a thousand years of mineral extraction. Especially since the high Middle Ages the practices and infrastructures of extraction have transformed the region. The Harz  provides an excellent laboratory for the collaborative investigation of a socio-natural landscape in the making and its multiple effects on societies and environments from the deep past up to present time. The MINESCAPES Summer School aims to explore and develop new interdisciplinary methods to investigate the complexity and dynamics of human-environmental interactions in one of the most prolific pre-industrial mining landscapes in Europe.

The MINESCAPES Summer School will bring together students and scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to study mining landscapes with a particular focus on the Harz mountains through cultural-historical methods, archaeological data, and scientific analyses of soils, waters, flora, and fauna to gain a more comprehensive picture of the complex human-environment relationships of this site. A fundamental goal of the Summer School is thereby to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and communicative skills between the humanities, social, and natural sciences—an urgent need, especially when dealing with human-environment relations in the past, present, and future.

For eight days an interdisciplinary group of twelve PhD students and several senior scholars from disciplines including history, archaeology, geology, ecology, and the earth sciences will explore the archives of nature (mines, forests, water systems) and society (historical maps and drawings, manuscripts and printed books of mining, metallurgy, alchemy, forestry, and water management in the collections of the Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel). The combination of field trips and library explorations will enable students to reflect on the historicity of materials, processes, and bodily experience in specific environments—questions that are central not only to the history of science but to human-environmental relationships more broadly.

The Summer School will include lectures from scholars in the earth sciences, history, and archaeology, visits to the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Rammelsberg mine (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/623/), as well as an introduction to, and group work in, the rare book and manuscript collections of the Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel (https://www.hab.de/en/). No prior experience, nor discipline-specific language or research skills are necessary to apply. One of the aims of the Summer School is to develop methods of collaboration between the natural and social/human sciences. Students will work in interdisciplinary groups to formulate feasible research questions of interest and utility in multiple disciplines.

The Summer School is generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and is organized by Tina Asmussen and Pamela H. Smith in collaboration with the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel and the Mining Archeology Unit of the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation.

Accommodation and most meals will be covered for participants and travel costs will be reimbursed after the event.

The Summer School will be conducted in English.