Paolo Squatriti

A historian of the moderately deep past, usually the first millennium AD, I attempt to bring out how postclassical societies in Europe and the Mediterranean engaged with the natural world. I am interested in the cultural elaboration of natural phenomena. I seek less anthropocentric narratives, in which the non-human has an active role in making history. My current work is about how early medieval Europeans classified plants, as excellent, good, bad, or terrible, and why they adopted such classifications. I’ve also recently launched a project on the relationship between the Tiber river and Rome over the long duration (in ancient, medieval, and early modern times).

My environmental historical research has involved water management, earthworks and other large-scale human marking of the landscape, climate history and its fabrication, the history of woodlands and forestry, and the dissemination of “exotic” plants, in the Mediterranean, northern Europe, and especially in Italy.

Affiliations

• Department of History
• Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
• Program in the Environment

Fields of Study

• Early medieval Europe
• Late Antiquity
• Environmental history
• Italian history

Awards

• LSA Michigan Humanities Award
• Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Faculty Fellowship
• LSA Excellence in Education Award
• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• Yale Program in Agrarian Studies Fellowship
• AAIS First Prize Book Award

Publications

Fifty Early Medieval Things. Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (coauthor with D. Deliyannis, H. Dey) Cornell University Press. Ithaca, forthcoming 2019.

“Rye’s Rise and Rome’s Fall,” Environment and Society in the First Millennium AD, ed. A. Izdebski, M. Mulryan. E.J. Brill. Leiden, forthcoming, 2018.

“Il clima dei Longobardi,” I Longobardi, ed. G. Brogiolo, F. Marazzi. Skira. Milan, 2017, 144-151.