Assistant Professors of Landscape Architecture John Davis and Justin Parscher will serve as Co-Principal Investigators for Agrarian Forms, an InFACT-funded project that will study historical agrarian spaces to investigate how agricultural practices and the forms they engendered have shaped current landscapes.

The research group will draw on diverse disciplinary perspectives, including faculty from history, landscape architecture, anthropology, geography, and sociology. Team members include Associate Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Sociology Kerry Ard, Environmental and Natural Resource Assistant Professor Shoshanah Inwood, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nick Kawa, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Forbes Lipschitz, Environmental Social Sciences PhD student Kelsey Ryan-Simkins, and Professor of Geography Joel Wainwright.

Research produced will link genealogies of landscape form across time and space, investigating how agrarian landscapes came into existence, what social configurations enabled those forms, and how certain landscape types persisted and transformed over time. Through a study of diverse historical agricultural practices and their linked landscapes, project participants will assemble historical knowledge that shapes our understanding of contemporary, everyday patterns of land use.

Work planned by the research team will include a document describing the problems and potentials of agrarian history studied from a morphological perspective. The team also envisions conducting a symposium that gathers agricultural and landscape historians, ecologists, and social scientists on the subject of Agrarian Forms.

A component of Ohio State's Discovery Themes Initiative, Connect and Collaborate grants encourage teams to develop and grow meaningful partnerships that catalyze engaged teaching, research, and service programs with measurable and sustainable benefits to the community and advance the strategic and scholarly goals of the university.