Closer to Home: Towards a Local Eighteenth Century

As specialists in the eighteenth century, our research is often defined by its focus on this period of time—but as this article aims to demonstrate, this expertise can also make an important contribution to interdisciplinary studies defined by other principles, including studies of place. By engaging in this type of interdisciplinary research, furthermore, we, as members of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), might also come to think differently about the boundaries and obligations of our scholarly community—or to whom, and for what, we imagine our scholarly work should be held accountable. Taking a wide view of these obligations, I am especially curious about how our typical subjects and methods might relate to the present climate crisis and, specifically, how they may contribute to the widening inequity this crisis will bring to the various places we teach and work. In what follows, I want first to examine a model of the type of transhistorical scholarship that could help us tell this story, and then to argue that experimenting with new approaches to interdisciplinary research is especially urgent now.

As many scholars across the environmental humanities have observed, the problems of both the climate crisis and the inequities it exacerbates are dense, nearly impossible to see in their entirety from any one angle. It now appears, however, that one significant challenge of this crisis is representational, a difficulty in narrating both the many commitments of modern life, anthropogenic but not individual, that have brought us to this point and any consequences beyond what can be measured with empirical methods.¹ In this context, any scholarship that can illuminate the influences, priorities, and quirks of perspective that make up this crisis's historical context is well situated to help researchers trained in more empirical methods see what exclusively material analyses cannot—and scholars with a special expertise in the period often identified as the origin of our current myopia are especially well equipped to help denaturalize the conditions of this crisis.² To date, however, successful models for interdisciplinary scholarship that incorporates both of these types of evidence remain relatively rare—and so to this end, I want to present here as an exemplar an Icelandic research team I encountered during a 2018 summer course on new research methods in the environmental humanities.³ Because their project, MYBIT, has a narrow geographical focus and a wide historical reach, spanning eight hundred years, this team includes no scholars with particular expertise in the long eighteenth century—but it does include a literary historian (Viðar Hreinsson), a historian (Árni Daníel Júlíusson), a biologist (Ragnhildur Sigurðardóttir), a climate historian (Astrid Ogilvie), and two archaeologists (Megan Hicks and Thomas McGovern), as well as a farmer in the Bárðardalur valley (Guðrún Tryggvadóttir), each with different expertise in dimensions of environmental sustainability and resilience. Together they aim to explain why the population of Lake Mývatn, a small region in northern Iceland, has consistently rebounded during the periods of encroaching sea ice or ovine plague that starved out many others—and in the interdisciplinary method they have developed for this work, I would argue, we can find a suggestive model for other studies of a single (and seemingly familiar) place over time.⁴ Attending specifically to the status of historical knowledge in the MYBIT project, we also find a number of opportunities for eighteenth-century scholars in particular: opportunities, mostly positive, to expand the range of our objects of study to include more material traces of eighteenth-century ideas in the present, but also opportunities to better account for the absences—material, intellectual, and human—that our methods and archives have often helped to justify.

To date, the MYBIT team has identified a number of different aspects of both local geography and land management practices in the Lake Mývatn region that appear to have contributed to its resilience, publishing the results of these collaborative investigations in a range of discipline-specific journals. In each publication, the lead author appears to have interpreted the evidence of the soil and...