Thomas Merton reading Rachel Carson, or, the politics of race and ecology in the 1960s
Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminars
Thomas Merton reading Rachel Carson, or, the politics of race and ecology in the 1960s
This event is part of the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminar Series.
Speaker: Alda Balthrop-Lewis (University of Oxford, visiting from ACU)
Tuesday 13 June 2023, 12.30pm -1.30pm
Biography:
Alda Balthrop-Lewis's (University of Oxford, visiting from ACU) research focuses on religious environmental ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms. She has particular interests in the role of the emotions in environmental politics and in the way that the concepts of 'religion' and 'politics' are related to theological histories of gender, race, nature, and nation. She welcomes PhD students working on related topics, especially those with a keen eye on the political and ethical implications of their research.
Her first book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), treats the nineteenth-century US author Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices. It argues that his asceticism is politically relevant – both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics. Alda's current project is about contemplation and broken politics in an ecological age, and it focuses on the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the politics of race and ecology in United States in the 1960s. Alda Balthrop-Lewis serves as the book reviews editor for the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, which is the publication of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion. She is also co-editor with Jonathan Tran of the American Academy of Religion book series Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published by Oxford University Press.
Before coming to ACU Alda completed a BA in Religious Studies at Stanford University, a Masters degree in Religion from The University of Chicago, and a PhD at Princeton University in Religion, Ethics, and Politics. She has taught in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, and she has worked as a research assistant for the Peabody Award-winning audio program On Being, produced in the United States. In 2023, Alda is the Denis Edwards Fellow at the Laudato Si Research Institute in Campion Hall, Oxford University.
All are welcome.
As always, if anyone would like to offer a lunchtime talk, film, reading, musical performance, conference proposal, or anything else relevant to the environmental humanities, please email envhums@torch.ox.ac.uk or fiona.stafford@some.ox.ac.uk. We would also welcome expressions of interest from potential DPhil students planning to work on Environmental Humanities topics.
For more details about the Lunchtime Seminars please follow the link.
