Women Writing Women’s Lives presents the Dorothy O. Helly Works-in-Progress Lecture from Janice P. Nimura, who will present her work on Rachel Carson and some of the 19th-century women who preceded her as generators of wonder in the natural world. Carson and her foremothers (including Beatrix Potter, Gene Stratton-Porter, Mary Treat, Anna Botsford Comstock, Mabel Osgood Wright, Florence Merriam Bailey, Augusta Foote Arnold, and others) wrote at the intersection of scientific precision and poetic grace. Their sex both constrained them and gave them license to write about ecology with emotion. In this era of mounting environmental crisis, their stories have never been more important.
Speaker Bio
Janice P. Nimura’s most recent book, The Doctors Blackwell (Norton, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography and a New York Times bestseller, as well as a recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai (Norton, 2015), was a New York Times Notable book. Her current project, Knowing Her Place: Rachel Carson and the Women Who Came Before Her, is under contract to Random House and has been supported by residencies at the Bogliasco Center, Yale’s Beinecke Library, Yaddo, and Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment.
This event is co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities, The Feminist Press, The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Graduate Center MA Programs in Biography and Memoir and Liberal Studies, and PhD Programs in History and English.
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