The Department of History will host its annual Casper Lecture with visiting scholar Dr. Julia Adeney Thomas on Monday, April 22, at 7 p.m. in the AMU Lunda Room. Thomas will be speaking on “Frameworks for the Future: Climate Change, the Environment, and the Anthropocene.”
The event is free and open to the public.
What is the best concept for talking about the destruction of the natural world? That’s where intellectual history can help. This talk explores three ways of framing our planetary challenge, each with its own science, history and politics. While each framework has its uses, Thomas argues that the Anthropocene best captures the unprecedented, unpredictable reality of our altered Earth.
Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She writes about concepts of nature and the Anthropocene, political thought, historiography and photography as a political practice.
The annual Casper Lecture was inaugurated by the History Department in 1993 to honor Rev. Henry W. Casper, S. J., a long-time member of the history departments at Creighton University in Omaha and at Marquette. He retired as professor emeritus from Marquette in 1974.
Casper was an expert in 19th-century European history and in American church history; his most important work was a three-volume history of the Catholic Church in Nebraska. The Casper Lecture, as well as several programs for graduate students in history, is funded by an endowment from Dr. and Mrs. Wayne L. Ryan of Omaha. Dr. Ryan was a student of Father Casper’s at Creighton.
