Lecture: “On Ecological Touching: Knowing (as) Intimacy”

This year’s  Sydney Warhaft Lecture will be given by Dr. Timothy Morton, author of many books on subjects such as ecology, food politics and object-oriented ontology and professor of English at Rice University.

Timothy Morton is the author of several books, including: Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, forthcoming); Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013); Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013); The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010); Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007); seven other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He gave the prestigious Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and he blogs regularly about topics such as “ecological awareness,” licorice and salty food, and intimacy with “nonhuman beings such as bunny rabbits and geological time. And electrons.”

A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton’s work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. He coined the term ‘hyperobjects’, in 2010, to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam. Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and Romanticism.

Where: St John’s College, Schultz Theatre

When: Thursday, February 5 at 7 p.m. Reception to follow

Title of Lecture: “On Ecological Touching: Knowing (as) Intimacy”

Wine:  Yes, and crudités, etc.

Morton is also giving a roundtable for Arts Graduate Students, entitled, “The Anthropocene: Tactics for Understanding it in the Humanities.”

Morton is also giving a roundtable for Faculty of Arts graduate students on Feb. 5 at 9:30 a.m.

Where: UMIH Boardroom, 4th floor Tier

When: Thurs, Feb 5, 9:30 a.m

Food and Coffee: Yes!