Dr. Gregg Mitman from University of Wisconsin-Madison will give a talk entitled “Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Disease, Commerce and Knowledge in a Global World ” for the University of Connecticut’s Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment. The talk will take place on Thursday, March 26, 4 pm at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Konover Auditorium, at UConn. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Four decades ago, the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby and William McNeill in The Columbian Exchange and Plagues and Peoples forever changed the importance historians put on the role of cultural and biological exchange between the old and new world. The idea that the transfer of diseases from one population to another played as important a role in empire-building as our human conquests became embedded in our cultural narrative. Mitman’s lecture examines how American military and industrial expansion overseas helped bring into being new views of nature and nation that would, in turn, become the scientific foundation upon which later historical narratives of ecological imperialism relied.
Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching and research interests span the history of science, medicine, and the environment in the United States and the world, and reflect a commitment to environmental and social justice. He is the founding and current director of the Nelson Institute's Center for Culture, History, and Environment, and is also curator of Madison's popular environmental film festival, Tales from Planet Earth. The author of three award-winning books, he is currently at work on a multimedia project—a film, book, and public history website—that explores the history and legacy of a 1926 Harvard medical expedition to Liberia and the environmental and social consequences that follow in the expedition’s wake.
The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series brings leading scholars and scientists to the University of Connecticut to present public lectures on nature and the environment. The lectures are open to the public and do not require registration. For additional information please call 860.486.4460 or visit http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/events/teale/teale.htm.
For more information, contact: Natural History Museum at 860.486.4460