Dr Alexander Hibberts

I work on climate and environmental history with a focus on late medieval and early modern Europe before 1900. 

I'm currently a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC-funded project Past Harvests. This interdisciplinary project combines history, business analysis and environmental science to provide historical insight for tackling contemporary UK farming challenges. I am part of a team of ecologists,  economists and system modellers working to assign sustainability ratings to agriculture on five landed estates in England between 1250-1850. I specialise in extracting data on historic land-use, weather and climate, demographics, crop types and livestock densities from documentary and landscape sources. 

I completed my PhD at Durham University in 2025 where I was supervised by Drs. Alex Brown, Christopher Courtney and Adrian Green. My doctoral thesis explored how individuals and institutions managed the risks of inhabiting marginal coastal landscapes in Little Ice Age Britain. 

Before coming to Exeter, I was the Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2024-2025). I've also been a visiting researcher at the University of Bern (2025) where I worked within a climate science team to extract weather data from early modern documentary sources for input into a computational climate model.

I'm an honorary fellow at the universities of Durham and London, and I'm a member of the Durham Centre for Environment and Humanities.

I am open to future partnerships (with both academic and non-academic collaborators) and welcome enquiries about my research.