Who reads Geography or History anymore? The challenge of audience in a digital age

The disciplines of history and geography favour quite different rhetorical venues for communicating their research findings. Geography long ago joined the rest of the sciences in preferring peer-reviewed journal articles as its principal mode of professional communication, whereas history is one of the last remaining disciplines still committed primarily to the book-length monograph. Neither format seems ideally suited to the increasingly dominant rhetorical media created by the digital revolution. How might geographers and historians best respond to the challenge of reaching academic and non-academic audiences in the 21st century?

Speaker:
Professor William Cronon
Chaired by: Professor Felix Driver FBA, Royal Holloway, University of London

William Cronon studies North American environmental history: how human beings depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.

This inaugural British Academy Lecture in Geography was held at the Royal Geographical Society during the week when the 16th International Conference of Historical Geographers was being held there.