In-Person Lecture: Taking Our Water for the City

Dr. April M. Beisaw will speak about the research behind her new book Taking Our Water for the City. For more than a decade, April hiked the New York City owned lands of Putnam and Ulster County to understand how city reservoirs changed the landscape and the peoples living upon it. In this talk, she will highlight her Putnam County work and its findings. Maps illustrating landscape changes over time will be shared and available for attendees to take home.

April M. Beisaw is a professor of anthropology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. There she teaches courses on archaeology, museums, forensics, and Native American culture. April is an archaeologist of the relatively recent past. Her active research projects use archaeological methods and theories to investigate the New York City water system and the New York State county poorhouses. This work brings April, and her Vassar students, into communities to collaboratively explore how the past shapes the present.