Session 1

Chair: Anna Akasoy (University of Oxford)

• Jussi Hanska (University of Tampere)
  “Individual Perception of Natural Disasters during the Middle Ages”
• Marie Louisa Allemeyer (Universität Göttingen)
  “Religious and Secular Ways of Coping with Storm Tides in Early Modern Northern Germany”

Session 2

Chair: Tim Barrett (SOAS)

• Anna Akasoy (Oxford University)
  “Fires in Arabic Historiography”
• Franz Mauelshagen (Universität Zürich)
  “Ordeals by Fire or the Embarrassment of Lightning: Divine Wrath, Politics, and the Media in Sixteenth and Eighteenth Century Zürich”

Session 3 (in German)

Chair: Andrea Janku (SOAS)
Discussant: Lars Laamann (SOAS)

• Mischa Meier (Universität Tübingen)
  “Catastrophe and Blessing: Orosius’s Reinterpretation of History”
• Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Universität Stuttgart)
  “Des-Aster: Interpretationsmodelle von Naturkatastrophen im Mittelalter – eine Skizze”

Keynote lecture

Grégory Quenet (Université Versailles St Quentin en Yvelines)
“Earthquakes in Early Modern France: From the Old Regime to the Birth of a New Risk”

Session 4

Chair: Franz Mauelshagen (Universität Zürich)

• Greg Bankoff (University of Hull):
  “Tale of Two Histories: Humanity and Nature at War in the Philippines 1896-1907”
• Andreas Dix (Universität Bamberg):
  “Natural Events Between Reality and Perception”

Session 5

Chair: Terry Cannon (University of Greenwich)

• Stephanie Summermatter (Universität bern)
  “The Role of the Media in the Swiss Federal Fundraising Routine during the Nineteenth Century”
• Andrea Janku (SOAS)
  “The Alienated Nation: Famine and the Media in Early Twentieth-Century China”