This year’s annual Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
The lecture, to be held on Thursday, September 12 at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom, is free and open to the public.
The title: “Of Compass, Chains, and Sounding Lines: Taking Thoreau’s Measure.”
Professor Walls specializes in American Transcendentalism, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Professor Walls is currently at work on a new biography of Thoreau.