Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Lloyd Sy "Buffalo Bird Woman Makes a Garden: Memory and Native Horticulture"

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?

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Lloyd Sy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Yale University. Sy is a literary historian specializing in American literature of the long nineteenth century, especially Native/Indigenous literatures and environmental humanities. He is currently completing a book project about deforestation in American letters between 1830 and 1920. Broadly, it argues that Native authors reinvigorated images of fallen trees and fallen forests, often taken as indications of settler colonial triumph, to suggest how artistic and cultural regeneration could persist through environmental degradation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Early American Literature, J19, Poe Studies, and Studies in American Indian Literatures. Sy got his A.B. in computer science and English at Brown University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Fellow.