Nina Toudal Jessen

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My research circulates around questions of landscape changes, property rights, ownership, nature-culture relations and public administration.

Currently, I am researching the making of a large scale land reclaim project in Western Zealand, Denmark during the 20th century in the project "Dry Land, Wet Soils" examines schisms of dry and wet soils. The project analyses the historically contingent ideational and
material barriers to the current calls for wetting agricultural peat soils. The project hypothesizes that the historical legacy
of past drainage schemes has created a firm common understanding of Denmark and Danish
agricultural soils as dry. Therefore, in order to understand what wet soils have entailed and what
rewetting implies, the project analyzes the material and practical consequences of the Soil
Improvement scheme in use between 1920 and 1966, through to the current debates on
abandoning agricultural production on lowland carbon rich peat soils by flooding drained
landscapes.

Fields of interest

Environmental history, agricultural history, planning history, spatiality, landscape history, theories of materiality, science and technology studies