Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lectures
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When: Thursdays from 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Multi-purpose Room, Curtis Hall, Medford Campus (except for Keynote Lecture)
Every Thursday at 12pm during the academic, the Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lectures feature speakers from government, industry, academia, and non-profit organizations to give presentations on environmental topics. This is a great opportunity to broaden your knowledge beyond the curriculum, meet other faculty and students, and network with the speakers. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the community are welcome to attend.
Environmental Studies has hosted this weekly lecture series since Fall 2011. That’s over 350 speakers and counting!
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The Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lectures are made possible thanks to the generosity of Daphne Hoch-Cunningham J82, A18P and Roland Hoch A85, A19P.
Watch videos of Environmental Lectures on YouTube
Learn about previous HoCu Environmental Lectures
We will continue with a hybrid format this year, so although speakers will speak on campus, viewers may tune into a livestream. Use the "Online Viewer Registration" link below each date to register via Zoom. You may also get the livestream registration by subscribing to our HoCu newsletter or sending an email to: environmentalstudies@tufts.edu.
Fall 2026 Lecture Schedule
- Sep. 10, 2026:
Campus as Commons: Agroforestry and Shared Stewardship at Tufts (Mary Mattingly) - Sep. 17, 2026:
TBD (Jennifer Baldwin) - Sep. 24, 2026:
From Lawn to Garden: Artistic Forms of Vegetal Resistance (Giovanni Aloi) - Oct. 1, 2026:
The Shoreline Is Moving. Should We? (Kim Starbuck) - Oct. 8, 2026:
How to Tell Environmental Stories for the Ear (Hannah Loss) - Oct. 15, 2026:
Pipeline Pedagogy: Prioritizing American Indian Peoples in Addressing Environmental Crisis (David Shane Lowry) - Oct. 22, 2026:
TBD (Juliette Rooney-Varga) - Oct. 29, 2026:
After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste (Nick Kawa) - Nov. 5, 2026:
TBD (Khris Nicolas) - Nov. 12, 2026:
Climate Change and Conflict in Africa (Eoin McGuirk) - Nov. 19, 2026:
TBD (Jeremy Eichler) - Dec. 3, 2026:
TBD (Kayla Mathes) - Dec. 10, 2026:
TBD (Jan Dutkiewicz)
Fall 2026 Lecture Information
Campus as Commons: Agroforestry and Shared Stewardship at Tufts
Speaker: Mary Mattingly, Visual Artist
Thursday, September 10, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Sep. 10
University campuses occupy significant tracts of land with contested histories of enclosure, aesthetic management, and institutional control. At Tufts, the transition from a working agricultural commons to a landscaped campus mirrors patterns documented across higher education, raising questions about what forms of access, stewardship, and shared governance remain possible on institutional land. Drawing on the commons governance framework of Elinor Ostrom and over a decade of large-scale social practice, artist Mary Mattingly will present her work on public food access, including Swale, a floating food forest in New York City's waterways that contributed to the city's first edible public foodway and introduce a proposed agroforestry installation at Tufts. The project would bring edible perennial plantings and participatory decision-making into the campus landscape, asking what it means for a university to act as steward of a living commons rather than as landowner.
Mary Mattingly is a visual artist whose practice centers on public food access, ecological systems, and the governance of shared space. She is the founder of Swale, a floating edible, landscape built on a barge that docked at public piers across New York City's five boroughs. Operating under waterways common law rather than public land regulations, Swale made free fresh food available to anyone, and contributed directly to the creation of the Foodway at Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx: the first space in over a century where New York City Parks has permitted public foraging in a public park. Her work has been exhibited at Storm King Art Center, the International Center of Photography, Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Barbican Gallery, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. Mattingly has received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, James L. Knight Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Art Matters Foundation. Her work has appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, and PBS's Art21, and is included in Henry Sayre's A World of Art (Pearson, 8th ed.).
Jennifer Baldwin
From Lawn to Garden: Artistic Forms of Vegetal Resistance
Speaker: Dr. Giovanni Aloi, Adjunct Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Thursday, September 24, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Sep. 24
At the intersection of the research developed in two of his books, Lawn, published last year by Bloomsbury, and Avant-gardeners, forthcoming with Prestel, the lawn and the garden emerge as cultural forms through which to rethink the relationship between art and nature. As a monoculture, the lawn suppresses biodiversity, demands water, fertilizers, pesticides, and repeated mowing, while offering no hospitality to animals and other forms of life. A rooted manifestation of outdated colonial and patriarchal ideals of order and normativity, the lawn conceals histories of exclusion and extraction, making the garden’s unrulier, more relational forms of cultivation all the more politically significant. The recent interest in gardening as an artistic practice constitutes a form of dissent against the extractive logics that have impoverished soils and reduced the living world to resource or passive backdrop. Many contemporary artists are now working with the vegetal world, unsettling the categories of artwork and process, authorship and collaboration. In their practices, cultivation becomes a way of unlearning modernity’s distance from the earth and of imagining new forms of situated belonging, more attuned to the relations of care that make all life thrive.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and co-editor of the ‘Art after Nature’ book series published by University of Minnesota Press. He is the author and editor of many books on art and nature including Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2018), Botanical Speculations (2018), Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), and Estado Vegetal (2023) Vegetal Entwinements (2023) co-edited with Michael Marder, Estado Vegetal (2023), Botanical Revolutions (2025), and Lawn (2025). Aloi has contributed to NPR, PBS, and BBC TV and radio programs, served as an academic adviser for many institutions and has curated exhibitions in the USA and abroad – among others, Earthly Observatory (2022) for the SAIC galleries, Lucian Freud Plant Portraits for the Garden Museum in London (2023), and Materialities (2025) for the Driehaus Museum in Chicago. He lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.
The Shoreline Is Moving. Should We?
Speaker: Kim Starbuck, A02, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Harbors Institute, U Mass Boston
Thursday, October 1, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Oct. 1
As climate change drives rising seas and stronger coastal storms, communities are facing difficult decisions about where—and whether—to rebuild. Across Massachusetts and around the world, a growing strategy known as managed retreat is challenging the idea that every shoreline can, or should, be protected forever. Instead, it asks a difficult question: When is it time to move?
This talk explores one of the most controversial topics in climate adaptation: relocating people, infrastructure, and development away from areas at greatest risk. This talk will provide real-world examples that explain why managed retreat is gaining attention, the social, equity, and environmental challenges it raises, and how thoughtful planning today can help create safer, more resilient communities for the future.
Kim Starbuck, A02 (Biology & Environmental Studies), is a Senior Research Associate at the Urban Harbors Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she leads research, planning, and stakeholder engagement on a wide range of ocean and coastal management issues. She currently manages projects focused on harbor and waterfront planning, climate resilience, commercial fishing infrastructure, dredging, marine pollution, boating access, fisheries, and coastal adaptation.
Her career has taken her on ocean adventures around the world—from monitoring gray whales off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, and protecting nesting sea turtles in Costa Rica, to teaching marine science on California's Catalina Island, responding to marine mammal strandings in Northern California, safeguarding bay scallops in Nantucket's coastal waters, and inspiring visitors through the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium. Today, she brings that diverse field experience to her work with municipalities, state agencies, nonprofit organizations, commercial fishermen, waterfront stakeholders, and community groups, helping develop practical, science-based solutions that strengthen coastal resilience, support sustainable marine resources, and prepare communities for the challenges of a changing climate.
Starbuck earned a Master's Degree in Environmental Science from the University of Massachusetts Boston and Bachelor's Degrees in Biology and Environmental Science from Tufts University.
How to Tell Environmental Stories for the Ear
Speaker: Hannah Loss, A17, Producer for GBH's Boston Public Radio and The Curiosity Desk
Thursday, October 8, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Oct. 8
How do you fit complex science into a 3-minute broadcast spot? What language works for listeners? What are the limitations — and benefits — of audio storytelling? In this lecture we'll look at two environmental radio features to understand the writing and reporting process for telling stories about things that don't talk (to humans, anyway).
Hannah Loss, A17 (Environmental Studies & English) is a producer for GBH's Boston Public Radio and The Curiosity Desk. She also reports on climate change resilience, conservation and, occasionally, porta-potties. Hannah has a master's degree in science, health & environmental reporting from NYU. She is a 2017 Tufts graduate who majored in Environmental Studies and English.
Pipeline Pedagogy: Prioritizing American Indian Peoples in Addressing Environmental Crisis
Speaker: Dr. David Shane Lowry, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at University of Southern Maine
Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Oct. 15
In the United States, non-Indigenous (non-American Indian) peoples articulate this environmental jeopardy within the privileges of stolen American Indian lands and worlds. Their articulations of climate change and various other related phenomena (e.g., data centers) are both out of conversation with American Indian peoples and non-responsible to the sovereignties and complexities of American Indian nations and communities as they (American Indian peoples) remain the preeminent sufferers of environmental poisoning and dismemberment within the United States. Using examples from his research in the Lumbee community, in/around MIT, and (increasingly) in Maine, David will begin to place American Indian peoples up front within communicative and policy processes that address environmental poisoning. This placement, which he labels “pipeline pedagogy”, shines a bright light on American Indian peoples as both the first (and continual) victims of environmental poisoning and key stakeholders in business and political processes that sometimes/often allow (and depend on) that poisoning.
Dr. David Shane Lowry, an anthropologist and member (citizen) of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at University of Southern Maine where he Directs the Indigenous Relationships Lab (IRL). He was Senior Fellow at Brandeis University (2022-23) and Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT (2021-22). His work focuses on various topics at the intersection of race, science/health, and Native America. David’s first book, Lumbee Pipelines: American Indian movement in the residue of settler colonialism (University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions. He is writing a second book titled Indigenous MIT: why we must save science and technology from American genocide (MIT Press). David has an SB (MIT, 2007), MA and PhD (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2010 and 2012, funded by an NSF GRF). His research tends to be public. For example, he has served as a consultant to the City of Cambridge (MA). He also hosts a podcast titled “Returning The Land”.
Juliette Rooney-Varga
After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste
Speaker: Dr. Nick Kawa, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University
Thursday, October 29, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Oct. 29
What happens when the modern toilet goes flush? Where does this waste go and what eventually becomes of it? Who is responsible for its management and who is implicated in its afterlives? And is it all just waste or might it be something more? This talk, based on Kawa’s new book of the same title, draws on long-term ethnographic research in the American Midwest to investigate these questions while also considering more radical alternative approaches to sanitation and ways of relating to bodily excess.
Dr. Nick Kawa is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University. His research projects largely center on the underground, with specific attention to soils, sewers, and zines. His most recent work is focused in northern California, where he is accompanying the efforts of community activists who are developing models of ecological sanitation in Santa Cruz and Mendocino counties.
Khris Nicolas
Climate Change and Conflict in Africa
Speakers: Dr. Eoin McGuirk, Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University
Thursday, November 12, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Nov. 12
Is climate change contributing to civil conflict in Africa? And if so, through what mechanisms? This talk examines the link between rising aridity in pastoral Africa and the outbreak of farmer-herder conflicts across the continent.
Dr. Eoin McGuirk is the J.C. Keogh and Family Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). His research interests are in development and political economics, with a particular focus on the causes and consequences of political violence and social divisions. In his research, he has examined how variation in world food prices can shape conflict events in Africa; how politicians are more likely to perpetuate conflict when they are sheltered from its costs; and how climate change is aggravating conflict between pastoral and agricultural ethnic groups. In most of his work, he employs natural experiments to identify causal relationships. He holds a PhD in Economics from Trinity College Dublin and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jeremy Eichler
Kayla Mathes
Jan Dutkiewicz