Each year, the Department of English invites a distinguished scholar to deliver The Robert J. Kane Lecture on a topic related to their current work. This year’s Kane Lecture will be delivered by Professor Rob Nixon, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, including the award-winning Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard, 2011), His areas of particular interest include environmental justice, climate change and the interface between the environmental humanities and the public humanities. Nixon is currently working on a collection of essays on environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
This talk will address some of the startling ways that environmental justice, spirituality, and biodiversity conservation have converged. Nixon will engage a variety of spiritual traditions from across the Global South, with particular attention to circumstances where those traditions have helped advance environmental justice and redress biodiversity loss. How, Nixon asks, have environmental and land defenders deployed spirituality to mobilize against injustice and degradation? How have their actions help shift the imaginative, ethical, and political horizons of the body politic? Nixon’s starting point is journalist Laurie Penny’s insistence that “throughout human history, the most important political battles have been fought on the territory of the imagination, and what stories we allow ourselves to tell depend on what we can imagine.” Often, Nixon argues, those transformative stories have a profound spiritual dimension, especially across the Global South.
Rob Nixon is a renowned scholar and public writer who holds the Barron Family Professorship in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University. His 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2025, Wetlands Press issued an Italian translation of his writings on environmental justice, including his previously unpublished 2024 Tanner Lectures at Yale.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.
Photo Credit for Images:
Buddhist monks ordain old-growth trees in Cambodia. Photo credit: Chantal Elkin
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.