EUGENE–William Cronon, who has emerged during the past decade as one of the most pivotal and provocative scholars in the growing field of environmental history, will deliver a free slide-illustrated lecture on Thursday, Oct. 26, as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2000-2001 Robert D. Clark Lecturer in the Humanities.

His lecture, "Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change," will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in Room 177 of Lawrence Hall, 1190 Franklin Blvd. An informal reception will follow.

Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will explore the ways in which 19th-century American landscape painting reveals how humans perceived and related to nature during that century.

A scholar of American environmental history and the history of the American West, he is a 1976 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale and a second doctoral degree from Oxford University. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, a Danforth Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow.

Cronon’s influential–and at times controversial–research focuses on the ways human communities modify the landscapes in which they live and the ways in which people are in turn affected by changing ecological conditions.

His first book, "Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England," is a study of how the New England landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Indians to European colonists. In 1984, the work was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

In 1991, Cronon completed "Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West" which examines Chicago’s relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the 19th century. One of three nominees for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in History, this book has won numerous awards. The book received the Chicago Tribune’s 1991 Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction, the 1992 Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, the 1993 George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, and the Forest History Society’s 1993 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award for the best book of environmental and conservation history.

In 1992, Cronon co-edited "Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past," a collection of essays on the prospects of western and frontier history in American historiography. Three years later, he edited another collection of essays, "Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature," which examines the implication of different cultural ideas of nature for modern environmental problems.

Perhaps Cronon’s best-known essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," appeared as the core of this 1995 volume. This controversial piece provoked a major re-thinking of the concept of wilderness among environmentalists and scholars, and the debate it sparked is far from over.

Cronon is currently at work on a local history of Portage, Wis., which will explore ways of integrating environmental and social historical methods with forms of literary narrative.

Cronon’s UO visit is co-sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Environmental Studies Program, the Beekman Chair in the Department of History and the Department of Geography.

The Bowerman Family established the Robert D. Clark Lecture in the Humanities in 1994 to honor historian and Eugene author Robert D. Clark, UO president emeritus. The Clark Lecture seeks to promote public discussion on the natural sciences, the history of Oregon, and the interface between science and social and cultural affairs as exemplified by Thomas Condon, legendary frontier missionary, geologist, paleontologist and a member of the University of Oregon’s founding faculty.

Clark inaugurated the lecture series named in his honor in 1995. Other Clark Lecturers were Chris Maser in 1996, David Rains Wallace in 1998 and Terry Tempest Williams May 2000.

For more information about this year’s Clark lecture, including disability accommodations, browse http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~humanctr or call (541) 346-3934.

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