Humanities Institute 2024 Book Award Ceremony

Professor Jo Guldi's 'The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights' is the HI 2024 Book Award Winner

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974.
 
"The Long Land War" provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

Jo Guldi is professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory University. A data scientist, writer, and historian, she has written about such subjects as the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, the history and politics of global land use, the origins of state-built infrastructure, the use of data for environmental governance, and quantitative approaches to the text-based archives of the past. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the University of Chicago. Her research has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Review, the Guardian, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, and Alternet. Find more about her work: joguldi.com, twitter.com/joguldi

The HI Book Award celebrates outstanding writers whose contributions to the humanities change the conversation by fostering new directions for their discipline. 

This is a hybrid event of Humanities Institute. For online attendees, Zoom link will be provided before the event.

• 4:00 – 5:00 pm, discuss book, Q&A.
• 5:00 – 6:00 pm, Reception.