Prize-winning environmental historian and author Jared Farmer to lecture March 9

March 3, 2010 -- Environmental historian Dr. Jared Farmer will present a free public lecture, “The Global in the Local” at Arkansas State University on Tuesday, March 9, at 4 p.m., in the Mockingbird Room of the Reng Student Services Center/Student Union, 101 N. Caraway Road, Jonesboro.  His visit is sponsored by the Heritage Studies Ph.D. program and the Department of History. Dr. Farmer’s most recently published book, “On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape” (Harvard University Press, 2008), has won four awards, including the highly prestigious 2009 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.

Dr. Farmer’s lecture, “The Global in the Local,” will contain insights both from his prize-winning book and from his present research. He is currently a resident Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, where he is writing his newest book, “Trees in Paradise: A California History.”

Dr. Farmer received his B.A. in history from Utah State University, his M.A. in history from the University of Montana, and his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. He specializes in the environmental history of the U.S. West and is also the author of “Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country (1999).”

In May 2007, Dr. Farmer accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in history at Stony Brook University, a campus of the State University of New York. Dr. Farmer’s history position is affiliated with a new center, the Consortium for Inter-Disciplinary Environmental Research (CIDER). This initiative was undertaken to bring together the many faculty at the university from diverse disciplines, housed in many departments, to create synergistic collaborations that could address large, complex environmental issues.

When Dr. Farmer accepted the Parkman Prize in New York City on April 17, 2009, he explained his approach to writing environmental history: “Historical fashions come and go: we have been admonished to remember the nation-state, to go beyond it, to embrace the transnational, to recognize the global, to return to the local. As a scholar and a writer, I’ve tried to creatively illustrate how the world turns in all these spheres at once. The best global histories will have some of the local in them, and vice versa… There are so many ways to play with the concept of scale. It’s exciting to contemplate a literary analogue or complement to Geographic Information Systems or Google Earth. Our narrative histories can be maps of words”

For more information about this event, contact Dr. Clyde Milner II
(cmilner@astate.edu), director, Heritage Studies PhD program and professor of history, at (870) 972-3509.
 

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