"The Riddle of Sustainability: A Surprisingly Short History of the Future"

(Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

8:00 PM Monday, November 17, 2014
Dennison Theatre

"The Portage: Storytelling and the Making of an American Place"

3:10 PM Monday, November 17, 2014
Gallagher Business Building 123

Please join us for a seminar with William Cronon. With doctorates from Oxford University (British urban and economic history) and Yale University (American history), Professor Cronon has compiled a brilliant teaching and research record. He taught at Yale from 1981 to 1992 and then at the University of Wisconsin as the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies. As of 2003, he became the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies. The Vilas Professorship is UW-Madison’s most distinguished chaired professorship. His fields of specialization are environmental history, the American West, and historical geography.

Professor Cronin's books rank among the masterworks of contemporary historiography. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) won the Francis Parkman Prize. A twentieth-anniversary edition appeared in 2003. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) won three book prizes, including the Bancroft, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has edited anthologies and published articles in scholarly journals, as well as op-eds and other interventions in the popular media.

Current projects, all under contract with W. W. Norton & Co., by Professor Cronon include:

“Saving Nature in Time: The Environmental Past and the Human Future,” a series of essays on the relevance of environmental history to contemporary environmental politics in the United States, based on the Wiles Lectures, which he gave at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in May 2001

A local history of Portage, Wisconsin (Frederick Jackson Turner’s home town), to explore ways of integrating environmental and social-historical methods with non-traditional narrative literary forms.

A book about the craft of writing non-fiction.

Professor Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur fellow. In 2012-2013, he served as the president of the American Historical Association. He is the epitome of the scholar as an engaged teacher, author, editor, and public intellectual.

The seminar and lecture are free and open to the public.