Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that our next Faculty Seminar Series will be by Dr. Eleanor Johnson, titled "Waste and the End of Camelot" on Wednesday, October 2, from 2pm - 3pm in the Forum Room 301. The talk abstract and the speaker’s bio are below. We'd appreciate you joining us for this event.
If joining on Zoom, please RSVP here.
Abstract: We tend to think that ecosystemic peril and its correlate, ecosystemic philosophy, are modern phenomena, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The European Middle Ages witnessed a period of profound ecosystemic danger and catastrophe--catastrophes in many surreal and surprising ways analogous to our own. From that danger and catastrophe arose a complex and important social philosophy around "waste." Looking at medieval English legal and poetic texts about waste together sheds light on some of the gaps in our current global ecological discourse.
Bio: Eleanor Johnson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her third book, Waste and the Wasters, analyzes ecosystem thought in the English Middle Ages, and was published by University of Chicago Press in 2023.
