Rob Nixon Will Become the Seventh Connelly Lecturer on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, at 8 p.m.

In addition to the Connelly Lecture on Thursday evening, Nixon will deliver an address to the English Majors at noon on Friday, Oct. 11, 2019, in Mears Cottage Living Room.

Martyrdom is direct action in extremis. Some environmental martyrs remain anonymous, their assassination unnoticed beyond their villages. But others gather posthumous fame and purpose, achieving in their earthly afterlife a rallying power and an enduring force. This talk will address the current surge in environmental martyrdom across the global South amidst the neoliberal resource wars and compound threats of climate change. Nixon will engage, in particular, the front-line conflicts that jeopardize the planet’s tropical forests and their inhabitants.

In this context, he asks: what is the relationship between the sacrificial figure of the environmental martyr and the environmental sacrifice zones that have proliferated across the planet under neoliberal globalization? And how have artists responded to at-risk environmental defenders and ecosystems by symbolically linking the fate of the fallen martyr and the felled tree?

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and scholar. He holds the Barron Family Professorship in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. Nixon is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, and elsewhere. Much of his work engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.