Dr Venus Bivar

About

Venus Bivar is Associate Professor of Environmental History at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intersection of environmental, economic, and European history. 

Dr Bivar is a social and cultural historian specialising in modern France, with expertise that extends across national borders. She examines how state-led economic policies shaped everyday life, drawing on the experiences of ordinary people and the symbolic frameworks that defined their world. She uncovers the historical roots of today’s global challenges - from international agricultural trade and climate change, to the dominance of economics in politics and the rise of free-market ideology in liberal democracies.

Dr Bivar is the author of Organic Resistance: The Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (UNC Press, 2018), an award-winning history of how French agriculture was transformed into a global industrial force in the wake of World War II. The book received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize and was shortlisted multiple times across North American and European scholarly communities. Her current work includes two major projects: one on how economic ideology has shaped climate change (Falling for Growth), and another on the toxic legacy of industrial development in postwar Marseille (Unsafe Harbour).