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 2025

September 19
Doug Rogers
Anthropology
Yale University
“Petroprotein: How British Petroleum and the Soviet Union Created an Oil-into-Food Industry in the 1960s”

September 26
Maryam Aslany
Visiting Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
"Cocaine: The Illicit Peasant”

October 3
Ann Farnsworth-Alvear & Daniel Varela Corredor
History
University of Pennsylvania; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"People with History, History with People: Participatory Research with a Century-old Court Archive in the Colombian Chocó"

October 10
Louisa Lombard
Anthropology
Yale University
"The Snakes Were Our Friends: How Other Species Get Caught Up in Genocide"

October 24
Michał Pospiszyl
History
Polish Academy of Sciences
“Escape Ecologies: Peasants, Nature, and Power in Eastern Europe, 1700-1850"

October 31
Carmen Soliz
History
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
"Revolution and Reaction: Diplomatic Relations between Bolivia and Peru in the 1950s and 1960s”

November 07
Scott Erich
Anthropology
Washington College
“The Subterranean Sea” 

November 14
Meredith Alberta Palmer
Geography and Indigenous Studies
University of Buffalo
“The Partial Indian in the Infrastructures of Termination”

December 05
Navyug Gill
History, Liberal Arts, & Philosophy
William Patterson University
“The Panjabi Peasant and the Limits of Global History”

Spring 2026

January 23
Sahar Bostock
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
Title TBA

January 30
Neel Thakkar
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
Title TBA

February 06
Juan Wilson
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
Title TBA

February 13
Lotje de Vries
Sociology of Development and Change
Wageningen University
Title TBA

February 20
Shalini Iyengar
Graduate Affiliate Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies, Anthropology
Yale University
Title TBA

February 27
Lydia Tuan
Graduate Affiliate Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies, Film & Media and Italian Studies
Yale University
Title TBA

March 27
Natasha Raheja
Anthropology
Cornell University
Title TBA

April 03
Devika Shankar
History
University of Hong Kong
Title TBA

April 10
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
History
Yale University
Title TBA

April 17
Alma Igra
History
University of Amsterdam
Title TBA

April 24
Graduate Student Colloquium