School of Arts and Sciences
Environmental Studies Program

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!

If you would like to receive weekly alerts about upcoming lectures, sign up for our HoCu newsletter.

The Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lectures are made possible thanks to the generosity of Daphne Hoch-Cunningham J82, A18P and Roland Hoch A85, A19P.

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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

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

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.).

  Lessons in Environmental Diplomacy 

Speaker: Jennifer Baldwin, Assistant Director, Yale University Office of Sustainability

Thursday, September 17, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Sep. 17

We are in a critical decade to avoid the worst predicted impacts of climate change, yet the global institutional architecture of climate action is undergoing a process of razing, renovation, and renewal. Jen will share lessons learned from her career as a practitioner designing climate and energy foreign assistance projects in the Global South for the United States federal government and multilateral institutions, parallels between this work and domestic climate action (in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, including higher education), and what we all can be doing to reinvigorate climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts going forward. 

Jen Baldwin

For twenty years, Jen Baldwin has devoted her career to climate change action. She has designed and implemented strategies and portfolios of programs delivering international climate and energy solutions with public, private, multilateral, and non-profit organizations, working both deep and wide on topics including clean energy transition, reducing deforestation, and advancing adaptation & disaster resilience. For nearly a decade, Jen led such projects in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a U.S. Diplomat and Foreign Service Officer based in Jamaica, South Africa, and Peru, prior to the agency’s closure in 2025. She also previously consulted to organizations including the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations Development Program. Most recently, Jen rejoined Yale University's Office of Sustainability, focusing on advancing the university towards its net-zero carbon targets. This is a poetic return since she worked at the Office while a Masters student at the Yale School of the Environment '10. This also brings her full circle back to her original roots at Tufts as an undergraduate BS in Environmental Studies '05, a student worker at at Tufts Office of Sustainability, and co-leader of the Tufts environmental club, pushing for campus climate action. 

  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.

Giovanni Aloi

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: Kimberly 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

Kimberly 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

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. 

David Shane Lowry

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”.

  Community-based scaling for innovations in sustainability

Speaker: Dr. Juliette Rooney-Varga, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell

Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Oct. 22

Society currently faces many, interconnected and accelerating sustainability challenges. We also have many innovative solutions that, if rapidly scaled, could help address these challenges. But most solutions do not scale or, if they do, only do so at rates that cannot keep up with intensifying problems. What if scaling could be accelerated through strategies that work? We’ll use an interactive, dynamic model of community-based scaling approaches to explore when this strategy is needed, how it works, and why it can be far more effective than outreach, advertising, or word-of-mouth scaling approaches. We’ll explore how community-based scaling has been used to innovations in sustainability education, regenerative agriculture, and political movements. The model and its initial application are described by Rooney-Varga et al. (2024).

Juliette Rooney-Varga

Dr. Juliette Rooney-Varga directs the Climate Change Initiative, co-directs the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, and is a professor of Environmental Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her current work focuses on translating climate change and sustainability science to support societal understanding and action. She uses dynamic modeling and interactive simulations to enable people to learn for themselves about the climate and energy systems. These simulations have been shown to motivate informed decision-making among students, citizens, and policymakers. This work received the 2026 Jay W. Forrester Award from the System Dynamics Society, given annually for the best contribution to the field of system dynamics. She earned a PhD from the University of New Hampshire, an MS from Cornell University, and a BA from Colby College.

  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.

Nick Kawa

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.

  Climate, food, and power: Lessons from now, directions for the future

Speakers: Dr. Khristopher Nicholas, Assistant Professor of Agriculture, Food and Environment at Tufts University

Thursday, Nov 5, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Nov. 5

There is widening gap between large-scale decision-making and on-the-ground realities of food insecurity. Drawing on experience that spans secondary analyses of environmental and health data alongside small-scale, community-based research, Khristopher draws from his experience at high-level decision-making forums—from IPCC expert meetings to COP30— which often diverge from community needs and lived experience. The presentation reviews findings from community-based work in small island settings, outlines the magnitude of global climate-related nutrition challenges with key statistics, and illustrates relevant mechanisms linking human and planetary health through food systems. Although climate is used as the primary lens in this talk, similar gaps emerge whether the driver is the food economics, policy, or agriculture, underscoring a central concern for global food security.

Khristopher Nicholas

Dr. Khristopher Nicholas is an interdisciplinary food systems scientist specializing in human–environment interactions. His work examines how climate and other environmental stressors shape dietary and health outcomes with emphasis on the role of human behavior as adaptive and preemptive responses. Using mixed methodologies, he links empirical measures of planetary health with community-based perspectives, centering traditional knowledge and lived experience. Reflecting his own upbringing in the Caribbean and Florida, much of his work builds on collaborations with communities practicing smallholder farming and small-scale fishing in climate vulnerable small island settings such as the Galápagos islands of Ecuador and in southwestern Madagascar. His work also explores food security in the United States, ranging from agricultural resilience to federal nutrition assistance program access. Dr. Nicholas earned a PhD in Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill, a BA in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, and completed a Yerby Postdoctoral Fellowship focusing on planetary health and nutrition at Harvard University. His non-academic loves include cycling, woodworking, science fiction novels, his cats, and no-recipe cooking.

  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.

Eoin McGuirk

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.

  Resonant Landscapes: Listening with Nature and History

Speaker: Jeremy Eichler, Assistant Professor of Music at Tufts University

Thursday, November 19, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Nov. 19

How do we hear the natural world? How has music shaped and reflected our understanding of the environment across time? This lecture explores the deep and evolving relationship between the nature of music and the music of nature. After sampling from both human-created musical works and from the sonic textures of ecosystems, we will consider the connections between sound and place as well as the role of listening as such in an age of environmental crisis.

Jeremy Eichler

Dr. Jeremy Eichler is the John McCann Assistant Professor of Music at Tufts University, where he recently created a new course called Music and Nature. This talk also draws from his current research at the intersection of cultural memory and the environmental humanities.

Formerly the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, professor Eichler is also an award-winning author. His book Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War, has been translated into ten languages and recently won the 2026 Grand-Prix du Livre France Musique.  

  Protecting carbon and communities: Transforming boreal fire management into a climate solution 

Speaker: Kayla Mathes, Research Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center

Thursday, December 3, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Dec. 3

Climate change is intensifying boreal wildfires. While fire is a natural process in these northern ecosystems, fires are burning more frequently and severely, with impacts ranging from local to global. Northern Indigenous communities are losing critical ecosystems that support traditional ways of life; smoke from Canadian wildfires is filling lungs across North America; and catastrophic fires are burning deeper into the soil—releasing ancient carbon, accelerating permafrost thaw, and worsening the impacts of climate change across the globe.

In this talk, Kayla dives into the work Woodwell is stewarding to better understand how fire management could be used, shaped, and transformed to better protect communities while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions from wildfire on carbon and permafrost-rich landscapes. This effort involves science, policy, people, compromise and a lot of humility. 

Kayla Mathes

Kayla Mathes is a forest and ecosystem ecologist currently working as a Research Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Her research team focuses on assessing how fire management in boreal ecosystems could protect permafrost and reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by boreal wildfires. This research involves working with fire managers, policymakers, and Indigenous and community leaders in Alaska to understand how leveraging fire management as a natural climate solution could work in tandem with addressing public health impacts of wildfire and Indigenous fire stewardship priorities. Kayla continues to devote her career to seeking innovative, science-driven solutions to climate change that meet the intersectional goals of emission reductions and environmental justice. Her focus on arctic and boreal ecosystems is motivated by the fact that these are some of the most vulnerable yet understudied ecosystems on the planet. She is passionate about exploring the natural world both professionally and personally. In her free time, she loves to eat good food, travel, rock climb and generally spend as much time as she can outdoors.

 TBD

Speaker: Dr. Douglas Rasher

Thursday, December 10, 2026 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Dec. 10

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Douglas Rasher