Cornell University Department of English and the 2017-18 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series present:

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Lawrence Buell (Harvard University)

“Remembering the Future to Keep It from Happening: Environmental Imagination in the Anthropocene”

The well-attested interdependences between the processes of memory and anticipation go a long way toward explaining both the power of environmental memory as a driver of bodies, minds, and peoples as well as its resistance to executive control. Nowhere are these complexities more revealingly on display than in works of creative imagination, which, so regarded, underscore the importance of the environmental humanities in confronting the challenges of the Anthropocene era.

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard. He has written extensively and lectured worldwide on the environmental humanities. His books include The Environmental Imagination (1995), Writing for an Endangered World (2001), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). In 2007 he received the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature scholarship. In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current book project is on “Environmental Memory in Art and Real Life.”

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell.

This lecture is part of the 2017-18 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series organized by Anindita Banerjee of Comparative Literature and George Hutchinson of English and the Knight Institute. The 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, and the American Studies Program.

~ Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall ~

This lecture is given in conjunction with Dr. Buell's graduate student seminar, "What Is Environmental Memory, Anyhow?", taking place earlier on April 12, from 12:30-2 pm. RSVP to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar. Follow this link to the seminar reading.