Zachary La Rock is a fifth-year PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) and a research affiliate at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
He researches the cultural durability and material vulnerability of mono crops in the contemporary world. His dissertation is a historical ethnography of material and symbolic transformations in South Italian agriculture since the 1950s. Particularly, it explores how, in quest of sustaining monocrops, scientists, bureaucrats, and farmworkers have navigated environmental circumstances beyond their direct control, especially pathogenic outbreak and land desertification. Ultimately, the dissertation foregrounds how competing projections for agriculture’s future are complicated by a limited understanding of the political, economic, and environmental contours that shaped inequality in the rural past.