"Humans and Non-Human Nature in Early Modern Italy"
Speaker(s): Karl Appuhn, History and Italian Studies (New York University)
Karl Appuhn’s research examines the relationship between humans and non-human nature in early modern Italy. He is most interested in the ways that technical and scientific expertise helped individuals and institutions make sense of the connections between society and nature. He has written about forest and water management in Renaissance Venice, and is currently working on a history of veterinary medicine in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy, which examines the connection between widespread zoonotic diseases (especially bovine diseases), changes in the Italian diet, and the establishment of veterinary medicine as an academic discipline at the University of Padua. He is also writing a general environmental history of early modern Europe.