New Books in Environmental Studies

How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2025) presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the chapters investigate a diverse range of literature and other sources, uncovering intricate ecosystems of relationships.

The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Laura Borghetti is a Doctoral Candidate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is a Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon
interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined
vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social sciences
puts it in a prime position to address the most pressing issues of our
time, such as climate change and social inequality. Its current reliance
on digital and technological solutions, however, has increasingly
caused landscape architects to lose sight of the ways in which humans
actually use spaces. And while landscapes are designed all over the
world, the discipline remains inordinately centered on the Global North.
Dr. Gareth Doherty's Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025) alters
that long-standing paradigm through real-life examples that provide
tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional,
diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use
them.
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There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.

In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion.Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work.Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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An exploration of the concept of cultivation, as conducted on both
the land and the body, which expands our understanding of it as
practice, aesthetic, and ideology.

In Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control (Yale University Press, 2026),
Jeffrey Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally
growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds
from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge
of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and
shops in the frontier cities of Brazil and beyond. In spaces where the
tangled forest once stood, clean pastures and ordered rows of crops now
sit on properties with geometric edges. From rural spaces to immaculate
lawns and cemeteries in the city, the imprint leads to the body, where
hair, like plant growth, is cut, trimmed, and otherwise managed.
Seemingly separate domains of agriculture, landscaping, and personal
grooming are governed by a similar aesthetic of control.

This unique pairing of land and body expands our understanding of
cultivation as a practice and as an ideology that operates in frontier
Amazonia—but also closer to home, influencing how we conceptualize and
interpret the covers that grow on and around us, and our imagined
relations with nature in the future. Hoelle argues that we must
understand this system of thought and the overlooked role it plays in
environmental destruction and social inequality.

Jeffrey Hoelle is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His research explores the social, cultural,
and political-economic dimensions of environmental transformation and
deforestation in frontier Amazonia. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia (UT Press, 2015)

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of
Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his
scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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