The End of the World As We Know It

Sir Jonathan Bate on How the Humanities Can Save the Planet

In almost every culture of the world, there is a myth of how one day a time of catastrophe will come when some powerful force – whether natural, supernatural or human – precipitates an apocalypse that will bring an end to our species and its environment. During the last 200 years, that narrative has often been of ecological catastrophe. Oxford Professor Sir Jonathan Bate expounds on how the humanities can help us to understand this narrative and apply it to the present and immediate future in which climate change and other challenges have the potential to destroy the world as we know it.

Following the talk, please join us for a dessert reception, where Sir Jonathan will sign copies of his book, "Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind" (2016). 

Biographer, broadcaster, critic, and Shakespearean, Sir Jonathan Bate is professor and provost of Worcester College, Oxford University in the U.K.

This "How the Humanities Can Save the Planet" lecture is one of a series presented by Bate as part of his spring 2019 ASU residency in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, with support from the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. 

Other lectures in the series are "Paradise Lost" (Jan. 16) and "Living Sustainably" (Feb. 20). Together, these lectures explore how humanities thought can help generate imaginative solutions to environmental concerns.

While we encourage alternative modes of transportation, parking is free and available in front of Changing Hands Bookstore.

Image at right: "The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" by John Martin, 1852. Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons.