This year Brown College's ViEWS Lecture Series welcomes Richard Tucker, Kate Rigby, Sean Borton, and Vandana Shiva.

The winner of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (also known as the Right Livelihood Award), Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental activist and one of the leading voices in the local food movement. Based in New Delhi, India, Dr. Shiva is the Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, a leader at the International Forum on Globalization and the author of over twenty books including Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (2008), Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005) and Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (2001). She is also the founder of Navdanya, an organization that promotes the conservation of diverse seed pools threatened by the spread of genetically-modified (GM) biota.

Dr. Shiva will provide a public lecture on Tuesday, March 20th at 5:30 PM in the Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library.

A preeminent scholar in the field of environmental history, Professor Richard Tucker is Professor Emeritus in the History Department at Oakland University and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. He has written widely on the environmental consequences of American business expansion into the tropical world. His groundbreaking work Insatiable Appetite: The United States and Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (2000) has become a staple of undergraduate environmental history courses across the country. His more recent work deals with the ecological degradation associated with modern warfare, an extension of his 2004 work Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward and Environmental History of Warfare, a work he co-authored with University of Virginia professor Ed Russell.

Professor Tucker will be offering a public lecture entitled "War and Nature: The Environmental Consequence of Modern Warfare," which will take place in Jefferson Hall (Hotel C) on the West Range, Thursday, September 15th at 5:15 PM.

Kate Rigby is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Deputy Head of the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Professor Rigby's research deals in large part with religious traditions and their influence on various communities' perceptions of the non-human world. Her many publication include Topographies of the Sacred (2004), which is an eco-critical study of European Romantic-era philosophies and aesthetics of nature and place, and (with Axel Goodbody) Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (2011).

Professor Rigby will speak in Nau Hall, room 342 on Tuesday, September 27th, beginning at 5 PM. Her talk arises from current research that lives at the intersection of literature, theology, and ecology. Drawing upon the witness of poets, ornithologists, philosophers and biblical writers, among others, she addresses some of the ways in which (other-than-human) animal calls might help to lure us out of the condition of "human self-enclosure," as Australian eco-philosopher Val Plumwood has termed it, which is so prevalent in modern industrialized societies, thereby enhancing our sense of our own ecological enmeshment and ethical responsibility towards nonhuman, as well as human, others. Among the calls that she considers are the communicative caroling of Australian magpies, the cries of an ill-treated mule from the Christian apocrypha, and the prophetic call of those many fellow creatures whose threatened extinction bears witness to a collective calamity of human making that we ignore at our peril.

In October, we welcome back 2008-2010 Sally Brown Fellow Sean Borton for a discussion of his most recent work related to his dissertation which explores eco-melancholy and the politics of environmental mourning in American literature. Sean's talk will take place in Jefferson Hall (Hotel C) on Tuesday, October 18th, beginning at 5:30 PM.