Paradise Lost: The Annual Environmental Humanities Initiative Distinguished Lecture

Sir Jonathan Bate on "How the Humanities Can Save the Planet"

In almost every culture of the world, there is a myth of how once there was a time when humankind lived at one with the natural environment until a "fall" divided us from our earthly home. Distinguished critic professor Sir Jonathan Bate explores this idea, across centuries, cultures and artistic forms, and asks how it can help us our understand our current crisis of sustainability.

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

The first lecture in the series, "How the Humanities Can Save the Planet,” is the annual lecture of the ASU Environmental Humanities Initiative and part of Professor Bate’s 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 "The End of the World as We Know It" (Feb. 5) and "Living Sustainably" (Feb. 20). Together, these lectures explore how humanities thought can help generate imaginative solutions to environmental concerns.

While we encourage you to bike or ride the Light Rail, 2-hour parking validation for the Rural Road Parking Structure will be available to community members.

Image at right: "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" by Thomas Cole, 1828. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.