Science, politics and environmental transformations
I've just returned from a few weeks in Mauritius, where I was lucky enough to spend some time both exploring the archives and exploring the island, to follow-up on and deepen my engagement with the island's meteorological history. I started working on the history of meteorology in Mauritius by following Albert Walter, founding director of … Continue reading Mauritius – notes from the archives
I'm delighted to announce the publication of a themed issue of the journal History of Meteorology edited by myself and Angelo Matteo Caglioti (EUI), on the topic of 'Relocating Meteorology'. The collection developed out of a conference session at the AAG annual meeting in 2015, and brings together a range of established and emerging voices in … Continue reading Relocating Meteorology: themed issue of History of Meteorology
s I returned from my trip to Malaysia last week, complete with a suitcase full of print-outs from the archives and a head full of ideas about how the development of meteorology in British Malaya fits into the wider story I want to tell with this project. Most of my time in Malaysia was spent … Continue reading Malaysia – notes from the archives
Last week I was delighted to join a workshop at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum on the history of weather science and weather extremes in the region. The workshop brought together historians of science with atmospheric scientists interested in using historical observations to reconstruct past weather and climate. It was a great day of cross-disciplinary … Continue reading Hong Kong workshop: Weather Science, Extreme Weather and Disaster Histories
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the airship as a speculative technology, particularly its history as an imagined agent of imperial connectivity in interwar Britain. More broadly I’m interested in how meteorology was used in this period to make the atmosphere legible and traversable, and a lot of the motivation for the … Continue reading Thinking with airships
This Thursday (14th July) we will be hosting Vladimir Jankovic, an historian of science at the University of Manchester, for a public lecture on the question of ‘What do we talk about when we talk about climate?’ The talk will form the first Hayman Rooke Lecture in Environmental Humanities, a new lecture series with which we aim … Continue reading What do we talk about when we talk about climate?
I've got a new paper out in Minerva, co-authored with Mike Hulme (KCL), on the establishment of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the UK Met Office. It's available open-access by following the link below: Modelling and the Nation: Institutionalising Climate Prediction in the UK, 1988–92 Abstract. How climate models came to gain … Continue reading New paper: ‘Modelling and the nation’
I have a new paper out in the Journal of Historical Geography entitled 'For an empire of 'all types of climate': meteorology as an imperial science'. It can be found on the publisher's website here, and a pre-publication version of the article can be downloaded here. The paper is the main output of the RGS-IBG funded project which I conducted … Continue reading New paper: meteorology as an imperial science
Martin Mahony 