Full video of “A Conversation with Alice Walker” and David Haskell’s 2016 Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture now online
Two of the Willson Center’s
most prominent events of the 2015-2016 academic year have recently been added to our Video page. “A Conversation with Alice Walker,” part of the acclaimed author and humanitarian’s visit to Athens and UGA as the inaugural Delta Chair for Global understanding, and David Haskell’s Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture on “The Forest Unseen: Ecology, Ethics, and Contemplation” are both presented in their entirety.
The Delta Visiting Chair, established by the Willson Center through the support of the Delta Air Lines Foundation, hosts outstanding global scholars, leading creative thinkers, artists and intellectuals who teach and perform research at UGA.
Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, which also earned a National Book Award. She has written six other novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry.
Walker joined Valerie Boyd, associate professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, for a public conversation in the historic Morton Theatre in downtown Athens. Boyd is the editor of a forthcoming volume of Walker’s journals.
David Haskell is an author and professor of biology at The University of the South. Among many other awards, Haskell’s book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature won the 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
His visit to UGA was co-sponsored by the Willson Center, the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, and the Integrative Conservation Ph.D. Program. Haskell’s lecture was the keynote for the Third Annual Symposium on Integrative Conservation.
The Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture is named for Eugene Odum (1913-2002), a UGA instructor from 1940 until his retirement in 1984. He has been called the “father of modern ecology” and was the author of the pioneering book Fundamentals of Ecology. Odum was instrumental in the creation of the Institute of Ecology at UGA, the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, and the Sapelo Island Marine Science Institute.