IU's Department of History is an active participant in the "Prepared for Environmental Change," the interdisciplinary project that recently received a multi-million dollar IU Grand Challenge grant. Carmony Chair and professor Eric Sandweiss heads the project's Human Communities team, which will study Indiana's people--past and present--in an effort to assess the human impact of environmental change. In addition to adding to our understanding of Hoosier culture, this work helps other project scholars to work with the public in building resilient communities in the face of ongoing challenges to our supply of soil, water, air, and natural resources.

Working with the new IU Environmental Resiliency Institute, the department has hired an accomplished postdoctoral research fellow, Elizabeth Grennan Browning, to help spearhead this research, and will also award several research assistantships to incoming students who will join the project in fall 2018. In 2020, the department will benefit from the addition of a faculty-level environmental historian, whose presence will add further to our existing expertise in this area.