Scholars in the new interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities argue that climate change, water security, environmental justice and other such challenges can’t be solved purely by economic and scientific solutions: Human culture is implicated in ecological conditions.
The Spring 2018 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series will bring to campus two leading scholars in the field. All talks in the series are free and open to the public.
Lawrence Buell, M.A. ’62, Ph.D. ’66, will speak Thursday, April 12 at 4:30 p.m. in HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, on “Remembering the Future to Keep It from Happening: Environmental Imagination in the Anthropocene.” Buell’s lecture is also the annual Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature, sponsored by the Department of English.
Buell is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. He has written extensively and lectured worldwide on the environmental humanities, and is considered a founder of contemporary ecocriticism. His books include “The Environmental Imagination,” “Writing for an Endangered World” and “The Future of Environmental Criticism.”
In 2007 he received the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature scholarship. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Buell’s current book project is titled “Environmental Memory in Art and Real Life.”
On Tuesday, May 1, Rob Nixon will speak on “Environmental Martyrdom and Defenders of the Forest” at 4:30 p.m. in Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
Nixon holds the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professorship in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. His books include “Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy,” and “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” which received the 2012 Sprout Prize for the best book in environmental studies.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the London Review of Books and Critical Inquiry.
Stephanie Lemenager’s talk,“Skilling Up for the Anthropocene,” has been rescheduled from March 20 to Sept. 18.
The 2017-18 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series is sponsored by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Society for the Humanities, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Science and Technology Studies; the Newton C. Farr Chair of American Culture; and the American Studies Program.
This story also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
