Fall 2021
September 17
Scott Reynolds Nelson
University of Georgia, History
Using Wheat to Rethink Capitalism and Slavery: Russian Imperial Finance, Land Grant Railroads, and the Southern One Percent
September 24
Dorian Fuller
University College, London, Archaeobotany
Contrasting Pathways to Domestication and Early Agricultural Productivities: Examples across Africa and Asia
October 1
Rossana Barragán Romano
International Institute of Social History
Empire of Labour: the Indian Mita in Peru, the Outbreak of K’ajchas, and the ‘Popular Economy’ in Potosí (16th to 18th Centuries)
October 8
Francesca Bray
University of Edinburgh, Social Anthropology
Moving Crops and the Scales of History: Thinking about Tuber Travels
October 15
Robin Derby
University of California, Los Angeles, History
Javier’s Murder: Politics, Sorcery and the Cattle Trade in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
October 29
Anne Eller
Yale University, History
The Caribbean and the World in 1898
November 5
Hannah Landecker
University of California, Los Angeles, Sociology & Center for Genetics and Society
Coming Home to Roost: Metabolic Science and Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century
November 12 CANCELLED
Frieda Knobloch
University of Wyoming, American Studies & Creative Writing
Ed Ray and the Esert Day: Wyoming’s Red Desert and the American Decadent Desert
December 3
Veronica Womack
Georgia College, Government
Black Agrarian Tradition within the Black Belt Region: Building a Land-Based Self-Determination Philosophy
December 10
Bathsheba Demuth
Brown University, History & Environment and Society
Giving a Dam: Beavers, Law, and Making the Yukon River
Spring 2022
January 28
Kristina Lyons
University of Pennsylvania, Anthropology
‘Nature’ and Territories as Victims: Decolonial Incursions in Colombia’s Transitional Justice Process
Sabine Clarke
University of York, History
The Chemical Empire: War, Development and Insect Control in Britain’s Colonies
February 11
Sai Balakrishnan
University of California, Berkeley, City & Regional Planning
Cities of Sugar: Agrarian Property in India’s Urban Transformation
February 18
Ashanti Shih
Wellesley College, Environmental Studies
Eradicating Goats, Eradicating Mainlanders: ‘Local’ Visions of Hawai‘i’s National Parks, 1960s-1980s
February 25
Elizabeth Williams
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, History
Of Mice, Sunn Bugs, Drought, and Taxation: Agriculture’s Compounding Crises in French Mandate Syria
April 1
Joseph Morgan
Yale University, History & Classics
The Districts of the Ram and the Elephantfish: Environmental Parameters and Social Articulations of Ptolemaic State Formation in Middle Egypt
April 8
Patrick Barker
Yale University, History
Provision Grounds, Pests, and the ‘Calabash Estate’ in Trinidad
April 15
Esteban Alfaro Salas
Yale University, Agrarian Studies
Cultivating Freedom and Autonomy alongside Portuguese Colonialism in Benguela in the Nineteenth Century
April 22
Catherine Peters
Yale University, Agrarian Studies
A Free Race of Cultivators: Afro-Asian Histories, Ecologies, and Intimacies in the Early Nineteenth-Century Caribbean
April 29
Wes Jackson
The Land Institute
The Emergence of Saving Remnants with a Few Helpful Examples for Living in a Down Powering World