The Program in Agrarian Studies presents Dr. Abby Goode specializes in American literature and culture, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary education:
“Agrotopias: Agrarianism, Eugenics, and Sustainability.”
Abby Goode is the author of Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), which was featured on the New Books Network Podcast. In Agrotopias, she reveals the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded American environmental traditions. Her peer-reviewed essays appear in journals such as Early American Literature, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Studies in American Fiction, Hybrid Pedagogy, and American Studies in Scandinavia. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the American Antiquarian Society, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the First Book Institute at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State. Her most recent scholarly interests include environmental storytelling, interdisciplinary pedagogy and program design, and early climate theories in the Americas. In 2022, she was awarded the Transformative Teaching Award and the Distinguished Scholarship Award at Plymouth State.
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?