Award-winning author William Cronon will present a lecture titled "The Portage: a Place in Time," which will include readings from his current work, on Thursday, April 4 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 4-370. It will be sponsored by the history faculty as part of the Sahin Lecture Series.
Cronon is a distinguished scholar of American environmental history and the history of the American West. His research focuses on the ways human communities modify the landscapes in which they live and how people are in turn affected by changing geological, climatological, epidemiological and ecological conditions.
He is the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has been president of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser environmental books series for the University of Washington Press.
Cronon's previous books include "Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West," which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for history and awarded both the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for best literary work of nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize for best work of American history.
For further information about the lecture, contact the History Office, at scobb@mit.edu or x3-4965.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 3, 2002.
