Shifting Landscapes and Shape Changing Trees: Political Geomorphologies of Pastoralism and Tree Care in Italy

Friday 29 January 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm

Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

All welcome

Shifting Landscapes and Shape Changing Trees: Political Geomorphologies of Pastoralism and Tree Care in Italy

Professor Andrew Matthews (University of California, Santa Cruz)

How do slowly growing trees, rapidly growing grasses, grazing animals and fires reshape landscapes? How can plant and landscape form guide us to histories of fire and grazing, of terrace building and drainage, and of shifting rivers and coastlines? Using examples from the Central and Southern Apennine mountains of Italy, I explore the politics of form and disturbance that reshape pastures, hillsides, drainage systems and coastlines. I argue that arguments from form move through our senses and stretch our imaginations across time and space.

Andrew Mathews is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a joint Ph.D. in forestry and anthropology from Yale University. He has studied relationships between people, plants, and landscape in Mexico, Italy, and California. His interests range from ethnoecology, STS, political ecology, and environmental history, in publications on Indigenous forest management in Mexico (Instituting Nature, MIT Press, 2011), to environmental humanities, human plant relations, historical ecology, and landscape ethnography, in Italian landscapes (Trees are Shape Shifters Yale, 2022). He has pioneered the use of landscape and tree drawing in environmental anthropology, and is now applying these methods to study the relationship between fire, grazing, and the political geomorphology of landscapes in California and in Italy.