Colloquium

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 are meaningful 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 subscribe 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 2026

September 18
Emil Keme 
English
Emory University
“Land, Learning, and Resistance: Yanomami Knowledge and Environmental Justice”

September 25
Ericka Beckman 
Spanish & Portuguese/Literary Studies
University of Pennsylvania
"Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism”

October 2
Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín 
Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
"Seeing Like a State or Measuring Like a Peasant. Measurement and Peasant Struggles. A revisit"

October 9
Margiana Peterson-Rockney 
Political Ecology
University of Montana
"Racializing Water and Agrarian Belonging in a Changing Climate"

October 16
Chitrangada Choudhury 
Geography
University of Zurich
“Of Carbon and Displacement: India's Compensatory Forests"

October 30
Basma Fahoum 
History
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
"Tobacco’s Enemy Number One: Palestinian Fellahin Managing Blue Mold Under Military Government”

November 6
Meghan Morris 
Law and Anthropology
Temple University
“The Salmon, the Cow, and the Spotted Owl: Endangerment and Federal Power in the American West” 

November 13
Christian Lund 
International Development Studies
University of Copenhagen
“Foothold. Popular Land Control at the Urban Frontier in Indonesia”

December 4
Nora Barakat 
History
Stanford University
“Civil Law and Agrarian Capitalism(?) in Late Ottoman Gaza: Old Questions, New Sources”

December 11
Yayi Zheng
Visiting Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
“Too Many Bulls: More-Than-Human Kinship in Borana, Ethiopia”