The Best Ideas? Natures, Nations, and Collective Memory

The conference particularly invites paper proposals that address one or several of the following issues:

• Landscapes and Cultures: how did nations come to perceive certain landscapes as iconic, and what did this mean for these environments and their human inhabitants?
• Nations and Disasters: how did catastrophic events shape national identities, and how did that influence political and social responses to these disasters?
• Iconic Species: why did some animals achieve iconic status, and what were the consequences for species, humans, and the environments in which they both lived?
• Identity as a Business Model: what was the role of economic interests (broadly conceived) in the construction and change of environmental icons?