Society of Fellows Frederik Braüner will deliver an introduction and response to a discussion between John Lopez (UC Davis) and John Davis (OSU). The event "American Environmental Machines, 1500-2026" is organized by the Buell Center and will be held in person and virtually on November 5, 2026, at 12:00 PM EST.

Frederik is both a current scholar in the Society of Fellows and the 2026-2028 Buell Center Research & Teaching Fellow.

About the event

Human efforts to engineer ecologies and landscapes in the Americas have long required massive amounts of labor and machinery. John López tracks the import of Dutch flood-control techniques to Renaissance Mexico City, where they faced the aquatic consciousness of Aztec Tenochtitlán. John Davis uncovers an unrealized project to redesign the American landscape after Reconstruction, leveraging the US Army Corps of Engineers to produce the largest ever swath of agricultural land reclaimed for freed people.

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