All lectures are presented fully online via Zoom every Friday at 3:30 PM. The link to join the meeting is https://go.wisc.edu/l880yf except when otherwise indicated. Alumni, friends and the public are always invited to attend.
March 20th –
Assistant Professor Claire Masteller, Washington University – St. Louis
April 10th –
Assistant Professor John Stehlin, UNC-Greensboro
April 17th –
Professor Patricia Ehrkamp, University of Kentucky
April 24th –
Assistant Professor Marcela Suarez, University of New Mexico
May 1st – Histories of Ordinary Landscapes
Professor Joseph Mason, University of Wisconsin-Madison
My primary research and teaching interest has been the histories of ordinary landscapes, in the Midwest, the Great Plains and elsewhere, those that don’t draw much attention from tourists or many geomorphologists for that matter. I use history broadly here, to include evolution over geologic time as well as the effects of people, both before and after the advent of settler colonialism. I use landscape narrowly to mean the physical, hydrological, and biological features of the land surface, from drumlins to drainage ditches. I will use two or three examples to demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of ordinary landscapes and their histories, how they are always transient, how their past history constrains but does not determine current change, and how, like politics and society, they can change little for long periods and then very rapidly. Along the way I may mention things I’m grateful to have learned from family, friends, students and colleagues, before and after finding my way to academia.