A New Ecology for Old Books

Kathleen Tonry (Associate Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Asmita Aasaavari (Sociology, UConn)

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Medieval literary studies have increasingly centered methodologies that think across past and present concerns about the environment, ecological change, and the agency of the other-than-human. Emerging in the field of book history as the practice of “ecocodicology,” this turn emphasizes the materiality of the book as it participates in non-human systems legible through the skins of sheep, the soils and grains of the land, the composition of inks and paper.

Yet premodern books are also products of human labor and, I suggest, trace the structures of our time-centered relationship to the natural world as a resource. This talk, taken from my larger project on time and the late-medieval book, looks toward a Marxist reading of political ecology through the terms posed recently by Kohei Saito, who emphasizes the human capacity to strategically shift temporalities—to slow down—as a way to heal a world damaged by the destructive tempos of ever-quickening capitalist metabolisms. I explore a remarkable tradition of fifteenth-century English almanacs that refract a transforming rural political economy, strategic ways of laboring, and new modes of representing time, proposing that these almanacs offer one example of reading and book-making in the “slowed time” of engagement and resistance.

Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on the history of the premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on forms of history-writing, the place of leisure, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Her current monograph project, Books, Labor, and Time: Experiments and Ambitions in Premodern English Texts, foregrounds the preoccupation with temporality among book readers and makers over the course of the fifteenth century.

Asmita Aasaavari is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at UConn. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of feminist gerontology, the sociology of care work, gender, and the political economy of aging. In her research, she uses interdisciplinary methods, and feminist, and sociological lenses to shed light on how aging and the social organization of care intersect with systems of inequality such as race, class, gender, disability and caste.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Silvic Stewardship: Incentivizing Environmental Care

Julia Smachylo (Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, UConn)

with a response by Jennifer Cazenave (French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)

Virtual, with automated captioning.

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This talk examines how environmental incentive programs, with a focus on those shaping private land management in forested landscapes, function as powerful spatial and political tools. By reframing these programs under the framework of incentivized landscapes, the presentation highlights how legal and fiscal policies actively produce socio‑ecological space, shaping both environmental outcomes and design possibilities. I explore how these landscapes operate as state spatial strategies, how they influence patterns and processes across ecosystems, and why their design consequences matter for planning in the Anthropocene. The talk introduces a conceptual framework for understanding incentivized landscapes as hybrid socio-political and socio-ecological systems, and discusses emerging perspectives that reveal new directions for landscape planning and design practice in this context.

Dr. Smachylo’s research and practice are situated at the intersection of critical urban theory, political ecology and landscape design, and focus on making visible largely unseen processes that shape both our interactions with, and physical form of, our environment. Working across disciplines, her research connects landscapes with multi-scalar processes of environmental stewardship, with the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to develop more holistic and socially responsible approaches to design intervention.

Jennifer Cazenave is an Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ (SUNY Press, 2019), offers a chronicle of overlooked aspects of the film’s making, while also framing broader questions about trauma and mediation, audiovisual testimonies, gendered memories, and digital archives. An Archive of the Catastrophe received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. A French translation is forthcoming in 2026.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.