Jim Clifford is an environmental historian in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. He completed his PhD at York University in Toronto in 2011. His research focuses on London and the British World during the long nineteenth century. He uses digital methods including historical GIS and text mining to explore the environmental and social history of industrialization in London and the global environmental consequences of Britain's growing industrial economy. Clifford also has an interest in the role of historians in providing context and contributing to solutions for the many challenges facing today’s cities, societies, and environments. To this end, he is a founding member of ActiveHistory.ca.
RCC Research Project: London's Ghost Acres, 1850–1919
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Mapping London’s Industry and Global Hinterlands, 1850-1914
Selected publications:
- "Mapping the Welland Canals and the St. Lawrence Seaway with Google Earth." In Historical GIS Research in Canada, edited by Jennifer Bonnell and Marcel Fortin. University of Calgary Press, 2014. (co-authored with Colleen Beard and Daniel Macfarlane)
- "A Wetland Suburb on the Edge of London: A Social and Environmental History of West Ham and the River Lea, 1855--1914." PhD diss., York University, 2011.
- "The River Lea in West Ham: A River’s Role in Shaping Industrialisation on the Eastern Edge of Nineteenth-Century London." In Urban Rivers: Re-Making Rivers, Cities and Space in Europe and North America, edited by Stéphane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
- "The Urban Periphery and the Rural Fringe: West Ham’s Hybrid Landscape" Left History 13, no. 1 (2008): 129–42.
- Digging Into Data White Paper: Trading Consequences, 2014. http://tradingconsequences.blogs.edina.ac.uk/files/2014/03/DiggingintoDataWhitePaper-final.pdf. (co-authored with Ewan Klein, Bea Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Colin Coates, Jim Clifford, Aaron Quigley, Uta Hinrichs, Nicola Osborne, and Ian Fieldhouse).