Karl Appuhn

Beginning in 1569, the republic of Venice began to conduct regular cadastral surveys of oak trees and forests in its mainland territories. For the next 230 years, the republic regularly repeated these surveys in an effort to locate and quantify critical timber reserves. This presentation will examine the political and social values embedded in these surveys, and how we can use them to think about how different people interpreted the meaning of those numbers in very different ways.

Speaker Biography

Karl Appuhn -Associate Professor of History and Italian Studies, New York University

Karl Appuhn teaches at New York University in the departments of History and Italian Studies. His research focuses on the environmental history of early modern Europe generally, and of Venice specifically.  He is am most interested in the ways that scientific and political institutions, social practices, and technology mediate the relationship between people and the natural world. He is the author of A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins, 2009).