The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.
Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
Please susbscribe to our mailing list here to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website. If you have any questions, contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu.
Fall 2023
POSTPONED– New Date TBA
Todd Holmes
UC Berkeley, Oral History Center
A Special Screening of “In A Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott”
September 15
Meghan Morris
Temple University, Law
Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín
September 22
James Sidbury
Rice University, History
Learning from Tacky’s Revolt: Coromantees, Creoles and Igbos in the Hanover Parish, Jamaica Conspiracy of 1776
September 29
Quincy Amoah
Franklin & Marshall College, Anthropology
Exploring the Mathematics of Bovine Ribs in Karimojong Ritual
October 6
Thomas Alter
Texas State University, History
Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: Agrarian Radicalism in US Political Culture, 1870s-1920s.
October 13
Abby Goode
Plymouth State University, English
Agrotopias: Agrarianism, Eugenics, and Sustainability
October 27
Roosbelinda Cárdenas
Hampshire College, Anthropology & Latin American Studies
Black Visions of Peace in Colombia: Against the Genocidal Spectrum
November 3
Brian Donahue
Brandeis University, Environmental Studies
Go Farm, Young People
November 10
Thea Riofrancos
Providence College, Political Science
Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
December 1
Dan Saladino
Independent Food Writer/BBC Journalist
Seedbanks: Necessary but not Sufficient. We Need to Save Entire Food Landscapes
December 8
Hannah Shepherd
Yale University, History
Crossing the Straits: Fukuoka and Pusan in the Making and Unmaking of Japanese Empire
Spring 2024
January 26
Hi’ilei Hobart
Yale University, Ethnicity, Race & Migration
What Returns, What Remains
February 2
Anthony Acciavatti
Yale School of Architecture
Drawing Like a Tubewell: When Water Percolates and Oozes Through Soil
February 9
Tanmoy Sharma
Yale University, Anthropology
Corporations and the Countryside: Natural Resources and Rural Politics at the Margins of Modern India
February 16
Samantha Payne
Agrarian Studies Associate Research Scholar
Atlantic Reconstruction
February 23
Sam Hege
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Watering Day and Night: How Bracero Workers came to Irrigate the Texas Panhandle
March 1
Aarti Sethi
UC Berkeley, Anthropology
The Suspicious Suicide: Masculinity, Pesticide, and the Political Economy of Hybrid Cotton in Central India
March 29
Sarah Osterhoudt
Indiana University, Anthropology
Vigilant Fields: Self-Surveillance in the Vanilla Boom
April 5
Sarah E. Vaughn
UC Berkeley, Anthropology
Thought Experiments with Technology: Climate Adaptation and Critical Humanism of/for the Global South
April 12
Philip Wight
University of Alaska Fairbanks, History
The Petro-Welfare State: Alaska’s Experiment in Fiscal and Ecological Sustainability
April 19
Madeleine Fairbairn
UC Santa Cruz, Environmental Studies
The Incumbent Advantage: Corporate Power in Agri-food Tech
April 26
Graduate Student Colloquium