Copies of "The Idea of Nature" Public Lecture Series Available Through ScholarWorks

In spring 2012, a new public lecture series, Ideas of Nature, began at Boise State University. The goal of the series is to promote interdisciplinary inquiry and to foster dialogue across the campus and community, based on the premise that big questions need interdisciplinary answers.

How are conceptions of nature expressed in literature, art, philosophy, music, and other humanities disciplines? How did ideas of nature change from 1660 to the present, a period of radical change and revolution?

The lecture series is continuing on March 12th when Dr. Dan Philippon, University of Montana, will
lecture on the “Slow Food” movement in Europe. Although Slow Food is often portrayed as a contrast to fast food, it is less about speed than scale. Visits with artisan food producers in Italy's Piedmont region, where Slow Food was born, illustrate the weaknesses in the romantic understanding of nature as "other" and confirm that scale is the key variable in the search for sustainability.

All lectures are free and open to the public and videos of past presentations can be downloaded from ScholarWorks:

• Robert Frost and the Forests of Vermont – John Elder
• Romanticism, Blake, and the Politics of Nature - Kevin Hutchings
• Henry David Thoreau and Health in Nature - James Engell
• On Metaphor and Progress: Nature in Literature and Landscape Painting in 19th Century America - Rochelle Johnson
• The Poetics of Nature - James McKusick

Each video is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Michelle Armstrong,
Librarian / Asst. Professor