As part of the Sustainable Futures Speaker Series, Dr. Sarah Wald will present “A Universal Killer? Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and the United Farm Workers’ Pesticide Campaign.”

Sarah Wald is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and English at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl.” Wald, an interdisciplinary scholar of U.S. literature and culture, holds a PhD in American Studies from Brown University. She focuses on the relationship between race and the environment with a particular interest in comparative approaches to Asian American and Latina/o Studies. She has published articles in Food, Culture, and Society, Western American Literature, and Díalogo. Her scholarship has appeared in Service Learning and Literary Studies in English, Asian American Literature and the Environment, American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons, and The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration.

The history of the United Farm Workers is entangled with the rise of mid-century environmentalism. This talk considers the complex ideological relationship between mainstream environmentalism and the farmworkers movement in the 1960s and 1970s, paying particular attention to the environmentalist perceptions of the UFW, the UFW’s pesticide campaigns, and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

The Sustainable Futures Speaker Series is presented by the Environment & Community Graduate Program and the Schatz Energy Research Center.

The presentation will take place Thursday, November 10, at 5:30 p.m. in ArtB 102.