NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. – Timothy Grieve-Carlson, assistant professor of religion at Westminster College, has earned the institution’s 2025-26 Henderson Lectureship Award.
Grieve-Carlson’s lecture, “The Icy Earth Swung Blind: A Human History of Climate Change,” will explore how people experience climate change – not as data or scientific models but as a lived, human reality. The public lecture will be presented in October.
“In short, I wanted to know what climate change really feels like for people living through it, even when they don’t have access to scientific data or weather forecasts,” Grieve-Carlson said. “Living through a period of climate change doesn’t always feel especially warm or cold, but it always feels unsettling, destabilizing and uncanny.”
The lecture draws from his current book project, under advance contract with Reaktion Books, which examines cultural responses to climate change during the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling from roughly 1300 to 1850.
By analyzing historical sources such as religious writings, literature, artwork and records of daily life, Grieve-Carlson investigates how communities understood and responded to dramatic environmental changes before the modern concept of climate science existed.
“What would climate change feel like without modern technology or the idea of climate as a global system?” he said. “A closer look at the past helps us better understand not only historical moments of environmental crisis, but our own.”
Grieve-Carlson, who lives in Pittsburgh, joined the Westminster College faculty in 2022. He earned his undergraduate degree in anthropology and religious studies from Drew University and his master’s and Ph.D. in religious studies from Rice University in Houston in 2022. Prior to joining Westminster, he was a 2021-22 fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
A published author, he has contributed to several academic journals, including American Religion, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture; Correspondences: A Journal for the Study of Esotericism; and Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft.
The Henderson Lecture was established by the late Dr. Joseph R. Henderson and his wife, Elizabeth, to encourage and recognize original research and scholarship among Westminster College faculty and to provide an opportunity to share that work with the academic community.