By Staff Reports
(Oahu)– Dr. Brett L. Walker is coming to the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to give a public lecture titled “An Environmental History of Terrorism: 9/11, World Trade Center Dust, and the Global Nature of New York’s Toxic Bodies.”
The free lecture will take place at the Art Building Auditorium on Tuesday, March 11, at 6 p.m.
Walker received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for his project, “The Slow Dying: Asbestos and the Unmaking of the Modern World.” He studies environmental history, the history of human health, and the history of science. His books explore how humans have altered the environment, or have been altered by the environment, across both historical time and geographic space. He investigates how nature, in manifestations ranging from infectious disease to nonhuman animals, has imposed its way onto the human past, as well as how humans have sliced, burned, extracted and engineered their needs and desires onto Earth and its living organisms.
His books include Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (2010), Winner of the 2011 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History, The Lost Wolves of Japan (2005), and The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590& ndash;1800 (2001).
Born in Bozeman, Montana, Walker attributes much of his interest in the environment to a childhood spent outdoors, working on a wheat and barley farm in Cascade, Montana, and fishing for trout on the Missouri River. Walker has concentrated his research at the intersection of human health, environmental change, and the history of scientific ideas to better understand the global challenges that face humanity.
This free public lecture is made possible by the late Dr. Dai Ho Chun through his estate gift, which established The Dai Ho Chun Endowment for Distinguished Lecturers at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Colleges of Arts & Sciences. Chun was a distinguished and visionary educator.
This lecture is also sponsored by the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature.