Staff profile

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 at the University of Exeter. This interdisciplinary project combines history, business analysis and environmental science to provide historical insight for tackling contemporary UK farming challenges. 

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. 

I've also held the Pearsall Fellowship in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2024-2025) and been a visiting researcher at the University of Bern (2025). In Bern, 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 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.

Research Interests

My research interests can be divided into four main areas:

Climate & Weather History 

I extract weather data from documentary and archaeological sources including landscapes, buildings, material culture, letters, private diaries and institutional records to reconstruct paleoclimate trends. I'm also interested in how social and cultural perceptions of 'weather' influenced the ways past societies responded to extreme weather events, and the impact this had on their long-term resilience to climate change.

Past Biodiversity Baselines

I employ records of past farming, landscapes and botany to reconstruct locally specific biodiversity baselines to guide nature restoration programmes and suggest sustainable methods for contemporary agriculture. 

Interdisciplinary Collaboration & Policy Impact

I strongly believe that research should benefit society. Consequently, I explore how researchers can better collaborate across disciplines and with non-academic stakeholders to develop novel solutions, perspectives and policy to help tackle the climate crisis. In 2025, I co-published an article outlining how (environmental) historians and scientists can better work together to advance the study of past (and future) environmental change. You can read a summary here.

I've also co-led a project in collaboration with Northumberland National Park Authority exploring how creative methods can inform landscape policy. 

Climate Communication

Local history contains a wealth of data on past experiences of adverse weather and examples of remarkable resilience. I investigate whether local history (and creative methods) can be used to engage harder to reach demographics to help design climate adaptation and mitigation strategies that reflect local priorities and concerns.

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

Book review

• The Buildings of England: Birmingham and the Black Country: by Andy Foster, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Alexandra Wedgwood, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2022, 870, pp. £45.00., ISBN 978-0-30022-391-0
  
  Hibberts, A. (2023). The Buildings of England: Birmingham and the Black Country: by Andy Foster, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Alexandra Wedgwood, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2022, 870, pp. £45.00., ISBN 978-0-30022-391-0. Midland History, 48(1), 113-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/0047729x.2023.2182516

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