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Colloquium Series 2020-2021

Fall 2020

September 17* at 5:30 PM
Todd Holmes
UC Berkeley
An Introduction to the Agrarian Studies Oral History Project

September 18
Ruth Mostern
University of Pittsburgh, History
Levees and Levies: The Yellow River Enclosed in Late Imperial China

September 25
Cassandra Mark-Thiesen
University of Basel, Switzerland, History
Progressive Empire? Liberian Agriculture, Black American Farming Experts and WWII

If you have trouble downloading the PDF file linked above, a Word document of the paper can be found here

October 2
Brian Lander
Brown University, Environment and Society & History
A Political Ecology of the First Chinese Empire

October 9
Emily Sellars
Yale University, Political Science
Emigration, Collective Action, and Agrarian Change in Jalisco, Mexico

October 16
Tariq Omar Ali
Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service
Agrarian Partitions: The Making of the East Bengal/Tripura Borderlands, 1947-1952

October 23* 11 am -4 pm 
Special Session: “Industrial Livestock Production, Global Health and Climate Change”
More details available here.  

October 30
Wendy Wolford
Cornell University, Development Sociology
‘Sweet Potato Right Now is Money’: The Contemporary Dynamics of Agricultural Research in Mozambique

November 6
Nisrin Elamin Abdelrahman
Columbia University, Society of Fellows
Land Enclosures, Disruptive Claim-Making and the Crafting of Post-Oil Futures in Central Sudan

November 13
Maria Paula Saffon Sanín
UNAM, Mexico, Institute for Legal Research
When Theft Becomes Grievance: The Violation of Land Rights as a Cause of Land Reform Claims in Latin America

December 4
Gerald Torres
Yale University, School of the Environment
Resiliency in Food Systems: Lessons for Climate Justice and Environmental Justice

December 11
Tim Wise
Small Planet Institute: Land and Food Rights Program
Old Fertilizer in New Bottles: Selling the Past as Innovation in Africa’s Failing Green Revolution

Spring 2021

January 29
Santanu Das
All Souls College, Oxford, Modern Literature and Culture
Beyond Commemoration: The Indian Sepoy in First World War Culture

February 5
Elizabeth Hoover
University of California, Berkeley, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
‘Our Living Relatives:’ Seed Rematriation and the Native American Food Sovereignty Movement

February 12
Zozan Pehlivan
University of Minnesota, History
A Climate of ‘Slow Violence’ in the Late Ottoman Empire

February 19
José Carlos de la Puente
Texas State University, History
Of Widows, Furrows, and Seed: New Perspectives on Land and the Colonial Andean Commons

February 26
Susanne Wengle
University of Notre Dame, Political Science
Technopolitics and the Human-Nature Nexus in Contemporary Russian Agriculture

March 26
Arianne Sedef Urus
Harvard University, History and Literature
Properties of Empire: Environment and Law in the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Cod Fisheries

April 2
Marina Welker
Cornell University, Anthropology
Indonesian Tobacco Agriculture and Contract Relations

April 9
Rui Hua
Agrarian Studies Fellow
The Schizophrenia of Sovereignty: Peasants’ Law of Nations and the People’s Game of Great Powers in the Manchurian Borderland, 1881-1932

April 16
Vikram Tamboli
Agrarian Studies Fellow
Malabar, Gentoo, and Pariah:  A Speculative History of South Asian Blackness in British Guiana

April 23
Hengameh Ziai
Agrarian Studies Fellow
Peasants as Human Capital: A Political Genealogy of Neoliberalism in Chicago School Development Economics