Staff profile

I am an environmental historian, specialising in medieval and early modern European history before c.1800. I arrived at Durham in 2016 and graduated with a BA (Hons) in History in 2020, spending an Erasmus year at Uppsala University (2018-29).

In 2020, I was awarded a NINE DTP 1+3 studentship in Social and Economic History jointly funded by the AHRC and ESRC. I completed an MA (Research Methods) in Social and Economic History (2020-21) and a PhD in Environmental History (2021-25). The latter was supervised by Drs. Alex Brown, Christopher Courtney and Adrian Green. I became an honorary fellow at Durham in 2025.

I have since moved to the University of London, where I am the Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History (2024-25) at the Institute of Historical Research. I have also been a visiting fellow at the University of Bern (2025), where I worked within a climate science team to extract early modern weather data for input into a computational climate model.

Research Overview

I specialise in reconstructing weather and climate before 1800, and untangling the complex inter-relationship between social, economic and environmental change in late medieval and early modern Britain.

My doctoral thesis explored how individuals and institutions managed the risks of inhabiting marginal coastal landscapes in Little Ice Age Britain. I investigated the long-term effectiveness of top-down governance of fragile, resource-rich ecosystems, and the relative importance of exogenous and endogenous variables in driving socio-economic and environmental change. I demostrated that floods and storm surges could be exaggerated, or even fabricated, to justify new strategies or the reallocation of resources. 

Currently, I am investigating a series of weather diaries from early modern England. These contain some of the earliest globally available instrumental data and allow us to expand the geographical and temporal scope of past weather (and climate) reconstruction.

I am especially excited by interdisciplinarity working, having previously collaborated with archaeologists, geologists, historical climatologists and physical geographers. Most recently, I co-published an article discussing how (environmental) historians and scientists can better engage with one another to advance the study of past environmental change. You can read a summary here.

I have also worked with non-academic stakeholders, including co-leading a project with Northumberland National Park in 2024 to explore how creative methods can inform landscape policy. This was funded by the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham.

I am open to future partnerships and welcome enquires about my research.

• Environmental History
• Historical Climatology
• History of Science and Technology
• Medieval and Early Modern Built Environments
• Monastic History

Journal Article

• The Future of (Environmental) History: A Roundtable Discussion
  
  Hibberts, A., Yeo, E., Shelbourne, I., David Roberts, J., Kartashov, K., Pepper, N., Worsfold, A., Suits, R., Banbury, T., & Suresh, A. (2025). The Future of (Environmental) History: A Roundtable Discussion. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440125100285

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Young researchers explore climate histories
  
  Hibberts, A., & Huhtamaa, H. (2024, May). Young researchers explore climate histories. Past Global Changes Magazine, 32(1), 54-54. https://doi.org/10.22498/pages.32.1.54