STEFANIA
BARCA

Stefania Barca is associate professor in contemporary history at USC, where she teaches Environmental History and Gender History. Originally from Italy, between 2009 and 2021 she worked as a senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), where she held various research leadership positions and supervised doctoral and postdoctoral research. Previously, she was a visiting scholar in the Yale University Agrarian Studies Program (2005-06), and received sabbaticals at the Universities of Berkeley (2006-08) and Lund (2015-16); most recently, she has been the fourth “Zennstrom” Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University (2021). Her research interests are in Environmental History and Political Ecology, with a focus on the industrial age, with a special attention to the labor/gender/ecology nexus. She has investigated hydraulic energy and the making of industrial landscapes (18th-20th centuries); environmental mobilizations (peasant, indigenous, and working-class) in Italy, Brazil, and Portugal from the 1970s to the present; she is currently researching Just Transition from a feminist perspective, with a special focus on care work. She has published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals; her latest book is Workers of the Earth. Labour, ecology and reproduction in the age of climate change (London: Pluto press, 2024). Other books in English are Enclosing Water. Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press 2010), which was awarded the Turku Book Prize in 2011; and the short book Forces of Reproduction. Notes for a Counterhegemonic Anthropocene, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. She is active in feminist, climate justice and degrowth networks, and her work has been translated and disseminated in several languages.