Ruth Mostern
Ruth Mostern is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the World History Association. She is the author of two single-authored books: Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2022. She is also co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016), and of a special issue of Open Rivers Journal (2017). Ruth is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the World Historical Gazetteer, a prize-winning digital infrastructure platform for integrating databases of historical place name information.
University of Pittsburgh
Session
In 2000, Mike Davis published the now classic work, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. The book’s main argument, that colonial policies exacerbated the effects of global climate patterns and led to the excess death of millions of people in late nineteenth century famines, stirred debate and ultimately led to the reassessment of colonialism’s lasting impact on the Global South. Ruth Mostern, Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh ), Nadin Heé, Daniel Hedinger (Leipzig University), and Shellen Wu (Lehigh University) will conduct a roundtable panel on the use of AI to read nineteenth century large-scale weather data and archival materials at scale to reexamine the famines that arose from the 1877 El Niño. We would like to revisit Mike Davis’ arguments in Victorian Holocaust with empirical evidence that new technological developments now make possible. Focusing on a crucial period in the late nineteenth century - for the rise of meteorological sciences, instrumentation, and global networks for the collection of data, we will share strategies, methodologies, and tools for using AI and other digital tools for large scale historical research. This panel brings together a range of fields that are rarely articulated at once: world history and the history of empire, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and digital methods for history.