Giulia Pacini's current research focuses on the history of deforestation and attendant discourses of climate instability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More generally she is interested in human-arboreal relations and arboreal representations of the French body politic in late ancien régime and revolutionary France. This work finds its place within the emerging field of literary and cultural plant studies while also intersecting with more traditional French political and environmental histories. Questions of particular interest include: How were trees apprehended and valued in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Why did they serve as such powerful metaphors in eighteenth-century French discourse? What kinds of material, symbolic, and ideological work did trees and tree metaphors do? Within this context, Pacini's research has often focused on the political philosophies that transpire from eighteenth-century discourses and practices of pruning, grafting, felling, planting, and transplanting.