Research project
The History of Health and Environment Network
Research Network
- Duration
- 2026 - 2029
- Contact
- Claire Weeda
- Funding
- Institute for History
The History of Health and Environment Network (HHE-Net) brings together scholars interested in the historical entanglement of human health, environmental change, and more-than-human life. Based at Leiden University’s Institute of History, HHE-Net fosters interdisciplinary collaboration within the institute, across the faculty, and through broader interfaculty partnerships.
The network starts from a simple but urgent premise: questions of health and environment have never developed separately. Agricultural transformations, urbanization, industrialization, colonialism, globalization, climate pressures, disease patterns, ecological disruption, and medical knowledge have all shaped one another over time and have increasingly converged in recent discussions on sustainability and One Health. HHE-Net provides a platform to study these connections historically and to explore how past societies understood, managed, transformed, and contested the relationship between human well-being and the natural world.
Our aim is to position Leiden’s Institute of History as a leading hub for the historical and interdisciplinary study of health and environment. While supporting research on environmental history and the history of health as distinct fields, the network also encourages innovative approaches that bring them into conversation. These include social science history, empirical legal studies, the history of science and medicine, disability history, colonial and postcolonial history, environmental humanities, and more-than-human history.
HHE-Net offers a space for exchanging knowledge, sources, and methods across sub-disciplinary boundaries. It also seeks to reach broader audiences through seminars, public events, town halls, and collaborations with local stakeholders, heritage organizations, and archival institutions.
HHE-Net grows out of a rich institutional and national landscape. Several initiatives in Leiden and beyond already provide fertile ground for collaboration, including the Environmental Humanities LU Inititative, the Blue History Network, the Health Humanities Network, the Leiden University Network for Health in Africa (LUNHA), and the History of Health and Healing Network. By working in synergy with these networks, HHE-Net aims to expand the research scope, interdisciplinary reach, and societal impact of historical scholarship on health and environment. The network offers a meeting point for scholars who want to understand how the past can help us think more critically, creatively, and responsibly about the shared futures of human and planetary health.