Landscape and Land Use
In her first book, Roads to Power (Harvard 2012), Professor Guldi explored how, in the early nineteenth century, an ambitious national infrastructure project—culminating in an extensive highway system—transformed the British landscape not only in the physical and commercial spaces, but also in its social dimensions, and established a framework for understanding the common ownership of sidewalks, roads, parks, and other public spaces in modern cities.
Along with other works of hers, such as “The Spatial Turn”, this exploration of Britain’s transformation into an infrastructure state represents an early exercise in exploring spatial theories from a dozen different disciplines and their intersections.
Professor Guldi’s most recent monograph, Long Land War (set for publication at Yale University Press in 2022), was a study of the many international land reform projects that rose and fell over the course of the twentieth century, with a broad agenda of social justice and economic equity, culminating in a planet whose citizens would have a equitable relationship to food, water, shelter, and the ownership of farmland. This book is the apotheosis of a great deal of scholarly reflection upon how we might protect the basic rights to land and water—and especially, in the inescapable context of climate change, whose challenges both amplify and expand upon the historical dilemma of eviction, displacement, and the multiple dimensions of land struggles.
In her work at the history faculty of SMU, Professor Guldi has been teaching a major lecture course, spanning two semesters and thirty weeks, on Land Use and Capitalism. She has also published multiple articles on these themes—and especially, upon the application of new digital methods to studies of rent and eviction.
Relevant Articles and Talks
Dec 2020 - RadicalxChange - "Land Value: Past, Present, and Future" - Jo Guldi and Alisha C. Holland, moderated by Matt Prewitt
“A Distant Reading of Property,” Washington University, St. Louis, December 7, 2020.
“Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.
"A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives," Sawyer Seminar Series on Information Ecosystems, Pitt University, Pittsburgh, PA, January, 2020.
(with Ben Williams) “Synthesis and Large-scale Textual Corpora: A Nested topic model of Britain’s Debates overlanded Property in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Research in Digital History 1:1 (2018): http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/. Includes code, data, and tool.
“Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.
“A History of the Participatory Map,” Public Culture 29:1 (January 1, 2017): 79–112. Link
“The Paper War of Land Reform,” Legal History Series, Boston University, March 2, 2017.
“The Longue Duree of Land, the Longue Duree of Land Reform: Towards a Utopian History,” talk at Uppsala University, November 21-22, 2016.
Apr 2016 -Harvard Law School - "Racial Legacies - Land of the Oppressed and Dispossesed" - Panel discussion on food justice.
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, June 24, 2015.
“Seminar on the Long Land War,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 13, 2015.
“Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the workshop on History, Culture, and Society, Harvard University, April 3, 2015.
“Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.
Feb 2014 - Stanford - "Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance?" - Talk on Mapping Food, Land, and Water.
Feb 2014 - Stanford - "Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance?" - Talk on Mapping Food, Land, and Water.
“Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance? Food, Land, and Water,” talk at the Stanford Center for Liberation Technology, January 9, 2014. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9HHWEpAVFU
“Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.
“The History of Participatory Mapping,” talk at Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.
“Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video online at: http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/23839?size=custom&custom_width=1000
Seminar, "Mapping Time, Mapping Space," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://storify.com/digihist/jo-guldi-in-gothenburg
"Digital Methods and the Long Land War," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://digihist.se/2012/12/13/jo-guldi-om-digital-historia/
“"The Long Land War: A Global History of Land Reform, c. 1860-Present" Harvard International & Global History Seminar, Harvard University November 28, 2012
“International Finance and the Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Histories of Land, Economy, and Power Conference and Workshop, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/ehppf/land/program.html Harvard University, November 10, 2012
Seminar, "Mapping Time, Mapping Space," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://storify.com/digihist/jo-guldi-in-gothenburg
“Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," Society for Textual Scholarship, Penn State, March 2011.
"Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010
"The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," University of Virginia Library, September 2010
2010 - landsploitation - mini-documentary - River Trip
2008 - landsploitation - mini-documentary - Introduction to Landscape Studies
2009 - Landsploitation - mini-documentary - The Memory Machine: Thinking About History at the Abandoned Book Depository in Detroit
2008-2009 - Landsploitation on Apple podcasts - Misc audio and video
“Citizenship and Connectivity: How Government Pioneered the Shape of Public Space in Modern Britain, 1803-1811” Panel on Landscape, North American Conference on British Studies, Cincinnati, Ohio (October 2008).