Each year, the Department of English invites a distinguished scholar to deliver The Robert J. Kane Lecture. This year’s Kane Lecture will be delivered by Professor Rob Nixon, a renowned scholar and public writer who holds the Barron Family Professorship in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University. Professor Nixon’s books include Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy and Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which won numerous awards, including an American Book Award and the Sprout prize from the International Studies Association for the best book in environmental studies. In 2025, Wetlands Press issued an Italian translation of his writings on environmental justice, including his previously unpublished 2024 Tanner Lectures at Yale. His newest book, Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life, will appear from Chicago University Press in 2026.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Aeon, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, Orion, The Village Voice, Critical Inquiry, Slate, Truthout, Huffington Post, Edge Effects, Times Literary Supplement, Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere.
Much of Nixon’s writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular passion for understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements. As an environmental humanities scholar, he believes that the socioecological challenges we face demand not just scientific, technological, and political responses, but imaginative ones as well.
Prof. Nixon’s talk will address the alarm that Richard Louv sounded in 2005: that children were trading too much outdoor time for indoor time on screens. His coinage—nature deficit disorder—has inspired. myriad studies into the benefits of getting outside. That research reveals a so-called `green dividend,’ the measurable physiological and psychological improvements that accrue from natural immersion. Yet such peer-reviewed studies typically ignore the way natural spaces are implicated in topographies of social power. How can we acknowledge the health advantages nature may afford, while also acknowledging that ‘losing yourself’ in nature is not an equally accessible ideal? For many communities, immediate risk and historical trauma shadow the great outdoors, making the `green dividend’ a more fraught, ambiguous attainment.
Photo Credit for Images:
Photo credit for speaker image: Sameer Khan
This lecture is free and open to the public. The nearest visitor parking is in the Ohio Union South Garage, 1759 North High Street.