2008-09 Programming
Sustaining the Earth: Public
Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities
Click here for schedule of events
This programming series focuses on themes of environmental sustainability,
with an emphasis on Iowa. CEAH will sponsor a public lecture series by some
leading public scholars, as well as a creative writing workshop at the Ames
Public Library and a photography exhibit at the Brunnier Museum.
Sustaining the Earth also intends to explore the role of public
scholarship at Iowa State University by hosting public scholarship seminars for 17 ISU faculty
and staff interested in how they might be able to
expand the scope and reach of their own scholarship through public channels
or to incorporate service learning in the classroom.
Program planning committee:
Brenda Daly, CEAH Director
Jean Goodwin, Associate Professor of English
Clark Wolf, Bioethics Program Director, Associate Professor of
Philosophy
Program co-sponsors: American Intercultural Studies Program, Bioethics
Program, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Horticulture, Dept.
of Natural Resources Ecology and Management, Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies, Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Miller
Lecture Fund
* (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences)
*This program was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell
Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the
University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in
Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College
and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before
returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to
practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the
annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity. The
partial financial support for this lecture series provided by the F. Wnedell
Miller Trust was obtained through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
at Iowa State University.
Coming to the Brunnier Museum: Imaging a Shattering Earth:
Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate
November 1, 2008-February 1, 2009
Imaging a Shattering
Earth: Contemporary Photography and the
Environmental Debatefeatures 56 photographs that look beyond our
individual rapport with the environment, our household water usage,
recycling efforts, and fuel consumption, in order to foreground the impact
of societal behaviors, industrial practices, corporate priorities, and
governmental policies. Favoring industrial complexes, mining sites, dried-up
lakes, landfills, waste ponds, nuclear test sites, and other exclusion
zones, these artists aspire to convey the big picture. By assuming a certain
distance from their subject, they draw attention to the reckless stewardship
of our planet.
Co-sponsors include the Bioethics program and the Brunnier
Museum.
Featured Speakers: fall 2008
Scott Peters, Cornell University
Scott Peters joined the Department of Education at Cornell University in
August of 1999. He holds a B.S. in Education (1983) from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in Public Policy (1995) from the
University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and a Ph.D.
in Educational Policy and Administration (1998), also from the University of
Minnesota. Before his graduate study, Peters served for ten years
(1984-1993) as Program Director of the University YMCA at the University of
Illinois, where he worked with students, faculty, staff, and community
members on a variety of civic education and community development
initiatives.
Dr. Peters research program is centered on a critical examination of the
social, political, and cultural identities, roles, purposes, and work of
academic institutions and professionals. He pursues and contextualizes his
research in two related lines of inquiry: a historical line that focuses on
the origins and early development of the national land-grant system's
agricultural extension work, and a line that utilizes narrative inquiry to
analyze and interpret the civic engagement experiences and public purposes
and work of contemporary land-grant scholars and extension educators. A key
theoretical and practical problem his research seeks to address is that of
the dilemma of the relation of expertise and democracy in the academic
profession.
Frederick L. Kirschenmann, ISU, Leopold Center
Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a longtime leader in national and international
sustainable agriculture, is Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. From July 2000 to November
2005, he served as the Center's second director since its creation in 1987.
Kirschenmann came to the Center from south central North Dakota where he
operated his family's 3,500-acre certified organic farm. He continues to
oversee management of the farm and has an appointment in the ISU Department
of Religion and Philosophy.
Kirschenmann holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago,
and has written extensively about ethics and agriculture. He has held
national and international appointments, including the USDA's National
Organic Standards Board. In 2006, he was appointed to the 19-member National
Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production operated by the Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health and funded by Pew Charitable Trusts to
conduct a two-year examination of key aspects in the farm animal industry.
Matthew Liebman, ISU Henry A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable
Agriculture
Matt Liebman's research group focuses on cropping system
diversification, soil amendments, and weed ecology and management. Included
within the scope of our work are experiments involving crop rotations, cover
crops, green manures, intercrops, conservation strips, animal manures,
composts, and insects and rodents that consume weed seeds. Much of the
approach he takes toward studying the crop-soil-weed interface is described in
Ecological Management of Agricultural Weeds (Cambridge University Press,
2001), co-authored with Drs. Charles Mohler and Charles Staver.
Recently Liebman has been involved in research examining the environmental
impacts of using new crops and native perennial grasses for biofuel
production. He serves as the Henry A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable
Agriculture and a member of the graduate faculties in Sustainable
Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Biorenewable Resources and
Technology, and Crop Production and Physiology.
Ted Steinberg, Case Western Reserve University
Ted Steinberg, Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History and
Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University, has worked as a U.S.
environmental historian for nearly twenty years. He received his doctoral
degree from Brandeis University under the supervision of David Hackett
Fischer and Donald Worster. Beginning in 1990, he spent three years at the
Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is
also the recipient of a 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2000 American
Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellowship and was the 2006 B.
Benjamin Zucker Fellow at Yale University.
Steinberg's publications have focused on the intersection of environmental
and social history. Some of his books are:
American Green: The Obsessive Quest for
the Perfect Lawn (Norton, 2006);
Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American
History (Oxford, 2002; National Outdoor Book Award; Pulitzer Prize Nominee
in History);
Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in
America (Oxford, 2000; Ohio Academy of History Outstanding Publication
Award; Pulitzer Prize Nominee in General Non-Fiction). He lectures frequently in both academic and non-academic
settings.
Patricia Klindienst, author
Patricia Klindienst began her career as an interdisciplinary scholar,
publishing the first of her ground-breaking feminist re-interpretations of
classical myths and biblical stories,
The Voice of the Shuttle Is
Ours,
while still a graduate student in Stanford Universitys Program in Modern
Thought & Literature. She wrote two companion pieces,
Ritual Work on Human
Flesh: Livys Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic, and
Intolerable
Language: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery as an award-winning scholar
and teacher at Yale University. She then left the profession, putting aside
the manuscripts of two scholarly books and began to write for
a broader audience. Her first book,
The Earth Knows My Name is the 2007
winner of the American Book Award, and tells the stories of fifteen ethnic
Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens.
Praised by readers as diverse as Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez, Klindienst's
eloquent and passionate rendering of the voices of ethnic peoples has been
called an original and exemplary kind of cultural study and essential reading for anyone seriously
interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship,
imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.
Andrew Light, University of Washington
Andrew Light is
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Adjunct Professor
of Geography and Public Health Genetics, at the University of Washington,
Seattle. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy &
Public Policy at Lancaster University (U.K.), a Faculty Fellow at the Center
for Sustainable Development in the School of Architecture at the University
of Texas at Austin, an Affiliate Faculty member of the Bard Center for
Environmental Policy at Bard College, New York, and a Studio Fellow at the
Studio for Creative Inquiry in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon
University. His primary areas of interest are environmental ethics and
policy, philosophy of technology, moral and political philosophy, and
aesthetics.
Most of Light's work in environmental philosophy has focused on the failure
of the discipline to fulfill its promise as a guide to formulating better,
more morally responsible environmental policies. Identifying several
theoretical debates in the field which have prevented it from aiding in the
development of better policies, Light argues that a pragmatist methodology
is needed to transform environmental ethics into a more practical ethics,
able to participate in the actual resolution of environmental problems.
Tarla Rae Peterson, Texas A&M University
Tarla Rai Peterson holds the Boone and Crockett Chair in Wildlife
Conservation and Policy at Texas A&M University, where she is a Professor in
the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences. Her research focuses on
the intersections between communication, environmental policy, and
democracy. Her research goal is to provide a theoretically rich analysis of
environmental policy that is useful to those who seek to transform the ways
humans inhabit the planet. Tarla has published the results of her research
in
Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (1997,
University of South Carolina Press), in her edited collection:
Green Talk in
the White House: The Rhetorical Presidency Encounters Ecology (2004, Texas
A&M University Press), as well as in scholarly journals, several book
chapters, and symposium proceedings. Tarla earned both M.A. and Ph.D. from
Washington State University.
Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Gregory Jay is the Director of the Cultures and Communities Program and
Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Jay's
research involves issues of multiculturalism and curriculum reform in
literature and American Studies. Publications include
American Literature
and the Culture Wars (1997), and
America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and
the Subject of Literary History (1990). Jay is a founding member of Teachers
for a Democratic Culture, a coalition of academics committed to preserving
education as a force for social change and as a site of cultural pluralism.
Jay has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY-Buffalo.
