What is a landscape? And why do landscapes matter? These fundamental questions drew together faculty members, curators, and select graduate students from Syracuse University and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF), at a Landscape Studies Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Seminar organized between 2018 and 2020. Landscape Studies at Syracuse University is dedicated to their research and reflections. It features essays, guest lectures, and a poem that explore landscape through different lenses: as “a physical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence, light and darkness, etc) in which cultural meanings and values are encoded,” as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it (Landscape and Power, 2002); a “contact zone” of imperial encounter, interaction, and conflict (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992); a node that binds together “more-than-human dramas,” in Anna Tsing’s words, where “humans [join] other living beings in shaping worlds” (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015); a cultural imaginary and a social construct; an archive of ruin and ruination; a locus of restoration and renewal; an artifice created through ink and paint (paintings and prints) and plants and animals (gardens); a place of adventure and exploration; a site of commodity production and commercial profit; and an assemblage upon which climate change leaves deep, indelible marks every day. Through all these conceptualizations runs a common thread: landscapes are not just the outcome of human interventions, they are inherently active with their own rhythms and pulses. Over the course of two years, participants in the Landscape Studies seminar presented research talks, worked through ideas for their creative projects, exchanged research methodologies, arranged film screenings, curated exhibitions, and organized symposia and guest lectures. They wove their way through seminar rooms, museum collections, exhibitions, the Adirondacks, and Zoom meetings. Funded by the CUSE Grant Program at Syracuse University, the seminar was also enriched by distinguished guest speakers Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, Emeritus, MIT; Bettina Stoetzer, Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology, MIT; and Mickey Mahan, Centro bus driver, Syracuse, New York.