“Beinecke Fellowship Program Symposium: Rachel Carson in the Archives” (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

In connection with the upcoming exhibition Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision, the Beinecke Library Fellowship Program is sponsoring a full day of programming featuring recent alumni of the program whose research has drawn on the Rachel Carson Papers. The day will commence with a panel discussion featuring Janice Nimura (25-26 Short-term Fellow), Michele Navakas (24-25 Short-term Fellow), and Zak Breckenridge (24-25 Graduate Student Fellow), and will be followed by a curator-led tour of the exhibition.

 

Rachel Carson Panel: Presenter Information

 

Michele Navakas is Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities at Miami University (Ohio). Her books include “Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023)” and “Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018),” winner of two book awards from the Florida Historical Society. She is currently at work on a book titled “Rachel Carson Reading, a defense of literary study at a time of climate crisis.”

 

Zak Breckenridge is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California, whose research uses critical theory, decolonial thoughts, and the history of science to study the literary production of environmentalism in the United States. The project that brought him to the Beinecke–Ecological Aesthetics and Environmental Reform, 1890-1990—is part of his dissertation research, which examines 20th-century U.S. environmentalism as a literary movement that sought to integrate scientific rationality, poetic imagination, and practical reform in the period from roughly 1930 to 1970.

 

Janice P. Nimura’s 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 Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Bogliasco Center, Yaddo, and Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment. She is the author of “The Doctors Blackwell,” a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography and a New York Times bestseller, and “Daughters of the Samurai”, a New York Times Notable book. She is the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and a proud Yale English major.

 

The exhibition curators—Carla Baricz, librarian for literature in English and Comparative Literature, and James Kessenides, librarian for American History—will be in conversation at a Mondays at Beinecke online event on Mon., April 27, at 4 p.m.