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Environmental Martyrs and the Fate of the Forest
Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In this talk, Rob Nixon will address the current surge in environmental martyrdom against the backdrop of the resource wars in the Amazon and beyond. The talk will offer an international perspective on the value of our planet’s inhabited forests and the threats to their viability. Nixon asks: what is the relationship between the sacrificial figure of the environmental martyr and the proliferation of sacrifice zones under neoliberal globalization? And what is the relationship between the fallen martyr and the felled tree? In conjunction with the 2019-2020 Department of English Goldtrap Speaker Series.

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and public intellectual working in the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. He holds the Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Aeon, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Slate, Truthout, Huffington Post, Edge Effects, Times Literary Supplement, Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere.

Sponsors: MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment, Department of English
Pearl Hogrefe Fund, Humanities Iowa, ISU Lectures Program (Funded by GSB)