Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries
Dust Storm at Dodge City, Kansas 10 a.m. March 30 '35 Stovall Studio, Dodge City, Kansas #2
Dust Storm, 12 o'clock noon, April 10, 1935 Dodge City, Kansas
Kansas Collection, University of KS Libraries
Photo of dust closing in on Strong Hall in 1935.
[University Archives, Strong Hall photos, 0/22/87, 1935]
Paul Hotvedt Landscape Painter http://www.groundsite.org/PaulHotvedt.shtml Over the course of 15 years Paul Hotvedt recorded the landscapes of northeastern Kansas in a series of oil paintings. Several hundred of his works are included in KUs Spencer Library Collection as part of the From the Ground Up project which has cataloged site-specific visual art in Kansas from a number of artists. From the Ground Up and it's founding group, the Kansas Conference on Imagination and Place, were co-founded by Hotvedt in 2001. A typical Hotvedt painting celebrates the beauty of the commonplace. The paintings might contain nothing more than a flat horizon and a nondescript clump of scrubby brush yet they may become meditations on the everyday. Hotvedt takes notice of the landscapes that most of us drive by without taking a second glance. With seasoned confidence, he recreates these rather ordinary scenes into paintings that are imminently interesting.
Terry Evans, Chicago photographer, has photographed the prairies and plains of North America and the urban prairie of Chicago, combining both aerial and ground photography. Recent work explores working steel mills and Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier. She has just completed a long term project about the town of Matfield Green, Kansas and the surrounding Flint Hills. She is currently photographing the North Dakota oil boom in collaboration with writer and producer Elizabeth Farnsworth. She has exhibited widely including one-person shows at the Chicago Art Institute, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and The Field Museum of Natural History. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her work is in major museum collections including the Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and many other collections. http://www.terryevansphotography.com/ Terry Evans June 2011
Edmund Russell Phone: 785-864-9474 Email: eprussell@ku.edu Curriculum Vita Edmund Russell is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of United States History (B.A. Stanford 1980; Ph.D. Michigan 1993). Russell's research synthesizes environmental history, American history, global history, history of technology, and science. His first major project focused on the environmental history of warfare. It culminated in a pair of books (War and Nature, Cambridge University Press, and Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, co-edited with Richard Tucker, Oregon State University Press). His second major project focused on evolutionary history, or the study of ways in which people have altered the traits of populations of non-human species and how these alterations have circled back to change human experience. He has published one book on this topic (Evolutionary History, Cambridge University Press) and has another under contract. A third area of interest is neurohistory, which draws on ideas from neuroscience to help us understand the past. He co-organized the first conference on neurohistory, edited proceedings of the conference, and collaborated on experiments with neuroscientists. Russell's research has received prizes in environmental history, history of technology, and history of science. He has received three teaching awards. Russell is co-editor of the Studies in Environment and History series for Cambridge University Press, distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, life member of Clare Hall at Cambridge University, and extraordinary member of the Human Sciences Center of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. He has been a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and a visiting scholar at Cambridge University. He has served as conference program chair for the American Society for Environmental History, book review editor for Environmental History, executive council member for the Society for the History of Technology, and member of the United States National Committee for the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science.
Uma Outka Associate Professor of Law uoutka@ku.edu 785-864-9241 402 Green Hall Professor Outka joined the KU Law faculty as an associate professor in 2011 and is an affiliate faculty member in the KU Environmental Studies Program and Center for Environmental Policy. She teaches environmental law, energy law and related courses, and property. Professor Outka is also a Member Scholar with the Center for Progressive Reform. Before coming to KU Law, Outka spent two years as a Visiting Scholar in Energy and Land Use Law at the Florida State University College of Law. As a faculty research partner with FSU's Institute for Energy Systems, Economics and Sustainability (IESES), Outka directed a Sustainable Energy Research Project aimed at understanding and advancing legal frameworks to support sustainable energy development. Before entering academia, Outka served as general counsel for 1000 Friends of Florida, a non-profit advocacy organization focused on growth management, environmental conservation and affordable housing, and worked as an attorney in general litigation with the Northeast law firm, Verrill Dana LLP in Portland, Maine. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Maine School of Law and holds a master's in public policy and management from the Muskie School of Public Service.
Paul Outka Associate Professor 3022 Wescoe Hall 785-864-2548 paul.outka@ku.edu Areas of Research 19thC U.S. literature and culture, literature and science, American poetry, African American literature.Theoretical foci include ecocriticism, critical race theory, trauma studies, aesthetic theory, and the posthuman. Selected Publications BOOK Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES and BOOK CHAPTERS: “Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century: Science, History, Scale. Stephanie Lemenager, Ken Hiltner, and Teresa Shewry, eds. New York: Routledge. Forthcoming. “History, the Posthuman, and the End of Trauma: Propranolol and Beyond.”Traumatology. 15.4 (2009) 76–81. “(De)composing Whitman.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 12.1 (2005) 41-60. “Whitman and Race (‘he’s queer, he’s unclear, get used to it…’).” Journal of American Studies, 36 (2002) 293-318. “Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.”Contemporary Literature, 38 (1997) 447-82.Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 114, Gale-Centage, 2002.Rpt. in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 136, Gale-Cengage, Forthcoming, 2010. Awards Winner of the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) Biennial Prize for “Best Book of Ecocriticism” published in 2007-08. University of Maine Trustee Professorship, 2007-08. American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Junior Faculty, 2004-05. University Honors Faculty. University of Maine at Farmington, 2003-07. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. University of Virginia, 1999-2000. Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award.Department of English, University of Virginia, 1994-95. Faculty Profile I started my scholarly career as a poetry critic, writing a dissertation and several articles on Whitman, and teaching a range of courses on American poetry from its origins through the present day. While my scholarship has become less structured by genre, I retain an emphasis on close reading and a profound, if often critical, engagement with poetry and literary modes of representation in all my writing. As my work has developed, I have focused my attention less on particular authors for their own sake, and more on how a range of political, theoretical, and historical problems have been refracted through literary and other forms of cultural representation. My first book, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, examines a neglected but centrally important issue in critical race studies and ecocriticism: how natural experience became racialized in America from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century. Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, I offer a critical and cultural history of the racial fault line in American environmentalism that to this day divides largely white wilderness preservation groups and the largely minority environmental justice movement. The book argues that “sublimity” and “trauma” name two racially marked outcomes of a structurally similar natural experience: a potent moment in which the division between the human and the natural becomes unstable. For white Americans, such moments generally resolve according to the template of the Romantic sublime; the subject emerges fundamentally empowered by his or her identification with the sublime object. For African Americans, by contrast, such moments of instability have often proven violently reductive, in a repeated and degrading association of the subject with the nonhuman natural environment. Indeed, the conflation of blackness and nature served as the principal “justification” for chattel slavery in antebellum America, and such conflations persist at the heart of most American racist ideologies. This interest in the history of the mostly unhappy intersection between racial and natural experience has extended into a long essay I’m currently working on—or a short book, we’ll see!—tentatively entitled “Western Landscapes and the Dreamwork of Whiteness,” that looks at the ways western environmental experience has been deployed to repress the 19th century history of eastern racial trauma with a particular focus on Owen Wister’s The Virginian. I am now deeply engaged with another book project, Evolution, Essentialism, and the Organic Sublime: the Nineteenth-Century Posthuman, a work that builds on Race and Nature’sconcern with materialism, embodied identity, and ecocriticism. The book argues that in the nineteenth-century transatlantic culture of Europe and the United States, a range of discourses—medical, evolutionary, chemical, environmental, literary—began to suggest that human identity was physical rather than spiritual, a particularly complex expression of the natural. Humans became a part of the earth that learned to talk, not Beings who transcended the earthly. In the book I examine a range of episodes I call the “organic sublime,” when an individual experienced a sudden and often profoundly disconcerting awareness of the radical material identity between his or her embodied self and the natural world. This constitutive similarity between self and world, I argue, was akin to what contemporary theorists of biotechnology call the “posthuman,” the sense of being a mechanism among mechanisms, of a profound materialist ambiguity (if not, indeed, crisis) in the relations among self, body, technology, and environment. The experience of the organic sublime was often deeply disturbing, both to the subject immediately involved and to the wider ideological formations prevalent in the nineteenth century that depended on a disjunctive relationship between human and nature, particularly essentializing discourses of identity such as racial “science,” social Darwinism, and the medicalization of gender. Such discourses, I argue, functioned in part to reestablish qualitative differences between (some) humans and the natural, and thereby to deaden the shock of the eruptive nineteenth-century posthuman. A version of the first chapter of this book was just published in Routledge’s 2011 Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century. My interests in evolution and scientific materialism extend into the 20th and 21st century as well. I recently published an essay, for example on the implications of a possible pharmacological cure for PTSD and am working on a second essay about enhancement technologies, and I offer courses on posthuman theory and biotechnology that stretch from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to contemporary scientific speculations on the ramifications of emergent biotechnologies, to recent science fiction. Associate Professor Outka's Curriculum Vitae
Joane Nagel University Distinguished Professor On Sabbatical Fall 2013 Email: nagel@ku.edu Personal Web Site Joane Nagel (PhD Stanford) is a political and cultural sociologist; her work focuses on ethnicities, genders, and sexualities in the US and in the global system, cultural production and construction, social and nationalist movements, American Indian activism, and global climate change. Her recent research includes “Climate Change, Public Opinion, and the Military-Security Complex,” The Sociological Quarterly (2011), “Deploying Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality in the Iraq War” (with Lindsey Feitz), Race, Gender & Class (2007), “Ethnicity, Sexuality, and Globalization,” Theory, Culture & Society (2006), “Men and Nations” in Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinity (ed. M. Kimmel, J. Hearn, R.W. Connell, Sage, 2005), Race, Ethnicity, & Sexuality: Intimate Intersections and Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford, 2003), and American Indian Ethnic Renewal (Oxford, 1996). Her current research examines the sociological dimensions of global environmental change, specifically the race, class, gender, and sexual dimensions of climate change.