The Agrarian Studies weekly colloquium features invited specialists who pre-circulate papers as the basis for an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium. The Friday colloquium explores the mutual perceptions between countryside and city and the patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them. Further details on each speaker and their workshop paper are circulated a few weeks prior to their visit.
Meghan Morris bio:
I am a cultural anthropologist and legal scholar. My research examines the role of law in conflict and peacemaking, with a particular focus on property over land. My book manuscript, Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia, examines how property can become understood as both the root of violent conflict and the key to peace. It explores this question through an ethnographic account of how the reordering of property is central to efforts to achieve a post-conflict era in Colombia. My current book project, This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream, examines the contemporary and historical relationship between property and paramilitarism in the United States. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Alabama Law Review, Tulane Law Review, and the Revista Colombiana de Antropología (Colombian Journal of Anthropology). I hold a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University. I am an Associate Professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Prior to joining Temple, I was Assistant Professor in the College of Law and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. I was previously the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation and a senior researcher at the Bogotá-based Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia).