“The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable”
Thursday, April 22, 2021, 12:00-1:30pm EST
Amitav Ghosh, Acclaimed International Author,
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and University of Oxford Distinguished Professor
Please join us live online for this unique Teale Lecture Series public event, co-sponsored with the UConn Reads Program.
Amitav Ghosh will be joined by experts from multiple disciplines to discuss climate change and The Great Derangement on Thursday April 22, from 12:00-1:30pm EST.
Are we deranged? Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the award-winning novelist and essayist addresses what he calls an “imaginative failure in the face of global warming” and examines our inability to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. He asserts that the extreme nature of today’s climate events makes them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining, and suggests that politics, like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action.
The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—and in his thought-provoking book, Ghosh serves a summons to confront the task. This special Earth Day event, co-sponsored with UConn Reads, will bring the author together with diverse experts in a unique forum to discuss this unparalleled task from multiple perspectives.
The thematic focus of UConn Reads for this academic year is “Environmental Justice and Human Rights” and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav was selected as the UConn Reads focal publication: https://uconnreads.uconn.edu
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He received his BA and MA from the University of Delhi followed by a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire.
Ghosh’s writings have been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the jury of the Locarno and Venice Film Festivals. Ghosh’s essays have been published in the New Yorker, the New Republic and the New York Times, as well as by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri in 2007, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India. In 2010, Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal.
This live online event is open to the public. For a link to register, please visit the event webpage at https://www.events.foundation.uconn.edu/website/21244/
For more information, contact: CSMNH at csmnhinfo@uconn.edu