Professor of Humanities Dr. Gioia Woods recently presented the paper, “Reclaiming the Italian Commons,” at the joint Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences conference in Portland, Oregon in July 2023. Her talk sought to understand and problematize historic and contemporary practices and representations of the commons in Italy and the Italian peninsula. Dr. Woods explored how land use practices—from the latifundia to the mezzadria— appear in literature and visual art, in culinary practices and activist agendas and examined the surviving traces of these systems of slavery and serfdom on Italian (or international) imagination and where competition for resources (animals, soils, marbles, seas, seeds, etc.) has become tragedy.
