Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660‐1830
Ed. Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook and Giulia Pacini
Publisher: Oxford: Voltaire Foundation
Release date: August 2012
ISBN 978‐0‐7294‐1048‐9
$102.00

Laura Auricchio, ADHT Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of Humanities at The New School, has a new book out, just released last month, titled Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660-1830. Co-edited with Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara and Giulia Pacini, an Associate Professor of French at The College of William & Mary, Invaluable trees explores the relationship between human society and trees through essays from 21 scholars. Addressing the way trees were valued across Europe and North America, the volume reveals how trees and tree products had an intensified significance during the eighteenth century, and how it may help re-frame environmental challenges that exist today.

In an interview earlier this summer, Professor Auricchio mentioned that in making the book, “the most rewarding outcome was the experience of working with, and learning from, scholars in a wide range of disciplines. As an art historian, I have worked collaboratively with other art historians (on exhibitions, for instance) but my coeditors on this project were scholars of English literature (Cook) and French literature and culture (Pacini), and the contributors came from a far broader range of fields and from every corner of the Anglophone world.”