walter harding – English Department News

September 4, 2019

Composer Gregory Spears to deliver 2019 Walter Harding Lecture

Composer Gregory Spears will deliver the 2019 Walter Harding Lecture on Wednesday, September 25, at 7 pm in Doty Recital Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus. His subject will be “Thoreau and Music.”

Spears’ song cycle Walden, which premiered in 2018 in a performance that the Washington Post called “gripping,” takes a series of excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden and arranges them in four structurally interconnected songs to loosely tell the story of Thoreau’s departure from and return to society in Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way we see Thoreau’s progression from anxious social critic, to passionate naturalist, to contemplative mystic.

Spears’ other compositions include Fellow Travelers, written in collaboration with Greg Pierce and based on the McCarthy-era lavender scare, and Paul’s Case, written in collaboration with Kathryn Walat and based on the Willa Cather short story of the same name. The latter was described as a “masterpiece” and a “gem” (New York Observer) with “ravishing music” (New York Times).

Spears’ music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (Boston Globe). In recent seasons Spears has been commissioned by The Lyric Opera of Chicago, Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, The Crossing, Volti, BMI/Concert Artists Guild, Vocal Arts DC, New York Polyphony, The New York International Piano Competition, and the JACK Quartet among others. He is currently working on a new evening-length opera, Castor and Patience, with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and scheduled for premiere in 2020.

Spears holds degrees in composition from Eastman School of Music (BM), Yale School of Music (MM), and Princeton University (PhD). He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen. He currently teaches composition at SUNY Purchase.

The Walter Harding Lecture is sponsored by the English department and supported through the generosity of the Harding family.

August 22, 2017

Author and activist Bill McKibben to deliver 2017 Walter Harding lecture September 30

Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben will deliver The 2017 Walter Harding Lecture on Saturday, September 30 at 4 p.m. in Wadsworth Auditorium on the SUNY Geneseo campus.

[Download the 11 x 17 poster here.]

McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an environmental advocacy group that uses grassroots organizing and mass mobilization to oppose new coal, oil, and gas projects; limit climate-warming emissions; support sustainable energy solutions at the community level; and educate governmental leaders and the general public.

McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, widely regarded as the first book about climate change written for a general audience, and Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. He writes frequently for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone.

The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, McKibben is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award and honored by the Thomas Merton Center with its yearly prize recognizing “activists who work on national and international issues that transform our world.”

McKibben’s annotated edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden gratefully acknowledges its “comprehensive and illuminating” predecessor, Walden: An Annotated Edition (1995), edited by Geneseo’s late SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding. Harding’s annotations are available in an online edition of Walden from Digital Thoreau.

You can learn more about Bill McKibben on his personal website.

August 14, 2014

William Cronon to deliver 2014 Walter Harding Lecture

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The lecture, titled “Wildness and the Preservation of the World: From Walden Pond to the 1964 Wilderness Act and Beyond,” will take place in SUNY Geneseo’s new Doty Recital Hall on Monday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m. As always, the Harding Lecture is free and open to the public.

The recipient of a 1985 MacArthur Fellowship, Professor Cronon is the author or editor of numerous publications, including Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang, 1983), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (W. W. Norton, 1995), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (W. W. Norton, 1992), and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton, 1991). Changes in the Land won the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. Nature’s Metropolis won the 1992 Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History, and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award of the Forest History Society. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Professor Cronon’s area of study is American environmental history and the history of the American West. According to his website, his research “seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.”

In 2012-13, Professor Cronon served as president of the American Historical Association. He has published essays on the practice of history and on the goals of a liberal education.

With Professor Paul Robbins, director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Cronon was interviewed on National Public Radio’s Science Friday for a September 2013 story on “Saving Wild Places in the ‘Anthropocene.'”.

An active citizen as well as scholar, Dr. Cronon serves on the governing council of the Wilderness Society and holds leadership positions in numerous other organizations dedicated to land conservation and to the history and protection of the environment.

Dr. Cronon’s lecture will be followed by a reception in Doty Hall.

February 17, 2012

Author Jeffrey Cramer to speak on Thoreau

Jeffrey S. Cramer, Curator of Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Concord, Massachusetts, will deliver a lecture titled “Living Deliberately: Thinking Like Thoreau Today,” in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Hunt Room, February 23, at 4 p.m. Refreshments will be served following the talk, which is free and open to the public.

Jeff Cramer is the editor of Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2004) and The Quotable Thoreau (Princeton University Press, 2011). The latter won the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in Humanities in 2011. His other works include I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (Yale University Press, 2007) and The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2009). He has two forthcoming books: The Portable Thoreau (Viking Penguin, 2012) and The Literary Way: Selected Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2013). More information about Jeff is available on his website.

The Thoreau Institute and the Thoreau Society are partners with the SUNY Geneseo English department and Milne Library in Digital Thoreau, a project to publish an annotated digital text of Walden that represents the progress of Thoreau’s manuscript through its seven draft versions, and that incorporates materials from the Walter Harding Collection and other collections curated by the institute.