In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire

Alicia Puglionesi, 2016-2017 Consortium Fellow, will discuss her book, which Kirkus called “a first-rate work of historical research and storytelling.” Winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in the Ohio Valley to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, the book is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. The first commercial oilfields in Western Pennsylvania and the Susquehanna River's hydroelectric dams make the mid-Atlantic region central to these resource narratives that are spiritual and political as well as economic. Puglionesi will be in conversation with Jared Farmer, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.