Brown Symposium XXXIX

Participants

This year’s symposium is honored to host these guest speakers. 

Hilary Cohen Depadre Carol Adams

Carol J. Adams is the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat now in a 25th anniversary edition, Burger, in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons Series, the forthcoming Protest Kitchen: Fight Injustice, Save the Planet, and Fuel Your Resistance One Meal at a Time, and many other books. She has edited several important anthologies on ecofeminism, feminism, and animals. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Christian Century, Tikkun, and Truthdig, among others. She lives in Dallas with her partner and two rescued dogs.


Robert Bullard Dr. Robert Bullard

Robert D. Bullard is often described as the father of environmental justice.  He is the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University 2011-2016. Professor Bullard currently is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy.  Prior to coming to TSU he was founding Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University. He is an award-winning author of eighteen books that address sustainable development, environmental racism, urban land use, industrial facility siting, community reinvestment, housing, transportation, climate justice, disasters, emergency response, and community resilience, smart growth, and regional equity. His latest books include Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina(Westview Press, 2009), Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States (American Public Health Association Press, 2011), and The Wrong Complexion for Protection (New York University Press, 2012).   Dr. Bullard is a proud U.S. Marine Corps veteran.


Christopher Cragg Dr. Christopher Carter

Dr. Christopher Carter’s teaching and research interests are in Black & Womanist Theological Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Religion & Food, and Religion & Animals. His publications include The Spirit of Soul Food (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming), “Blood in the Soil: The Racial, Racist, and Religious Dimensions of Environmentalism” in The Bloomsbury Handbook on Religion and Nature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Future of Meat Without Animals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). In them, he explores the intersectional oppressions experienced by people of color, the environment, and animals. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of San Diego and a Faith in Food Fellow at Farm Forward.


Andrew Revkin Andrew Revkin

Andrew Revkin is one of America’s most honored and experienced journalists and authors focused on environmental and human sustainability and efforts to use new communication tools to foster progress on a finite, fast-forward planet. In the spring of 2018, he joined the staff of the National Geographic Society as strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism. There he is helping expand the Society’s funding and support system for journalism and storytelling that can advance the human journey and conserve biological diversity in a century of momentous global change and challenges. “Weather: An Illustrated History,” written with the environmental educator Lisa Mechaley, is his fourth book.

He has written on global environmental change and risk for more than 30 years, reporting from the North Pole to the White House, the Amazon rain forest to the Vatican — mostly for The New York Times. From 2016 through early 2018, he was the senior reporter for climate change at the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. From 2010 through 2016 he wrote his award-winning Dot Earth blog for The New York Times Opinion section and was the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. There, he developed and taught a graduate course called “Blogging a Better Planet” and co-created an award-winning field course on environmental filmmaking.

Revkin has crossed over into scientific scholarship. He played an early role in the evolution of the hypothesis that humans have triggered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. In his 1992 climate book, he wrote: “Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene period for its causative element—for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene [sic]. After all, it is a geological age of our own making.” That future arrived just eight years later, in 2000, when scientists formally proposed such an epoch. Revkin was invited to join the Anthropocene Working Group and served from 2011 through 2016. He is a co-author on a series of related peer-reviewed papers.


Douglas Cushing Douglas Cushing

Douglas Cushing is a Ph.D. Candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Cushing will be the guest curator for the Symposium’s art exhibit, Listening to the Anthropocene.” His dissertation, provisionally titled “Inter-war Romanticism, Revolution, and Modernism on Display in transition,” approaches Eugene Jolas’s little magazine transition (1927-38) as a virtual gallery space and meeting place, as well as a transatlantic vehicle for the transmission, circulation, and transformation of avant-garde ideas. Cushing’s past research includes work on Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), beginning before the advent of Dada and Surrealism. Cushing was the 2013-14 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where he subsequently curated Goya: Mad Reason (June 19 to September 25, 2016). Cushing’s most recent major awards include the 2017-18 Houghton Mifflin Fellowship in Publishing History, from the Houghton Library at Harvard University, a University Graduate Continuing Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and the 2018-19 Vivian L. Smith Fellowship at the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas.


David Asbury David Asbury

Asbury, guitarist, is an active performer, teacher, scholar and adjudicator who has appeared on concert stages in Europe, Canada, Central America and throughout the United States, including performing at the Kennedy Center. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Diploma of Merit from the Academia Chigiana, Italy. He has served on the faculty of Southwestern University since 1992. As a scholar, Dr. Asbury is currently engaged in research related to composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.


Bruce Cain Bruce Cain

Bruce Cain has performed a variety of roles in the following opera companies: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera Theatre, Skylight Comic Opera, Pamiro Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Whitewater Opera, and Opera Grand Rapids. In addition to his opera appearances, recent concert performances include Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Billings Montana Symphony, Britten’s War Requiem with the Wheaton Symphony, and Handel’s Messiah with the Austin Symphony.