On Friday, December 3, 2021, Megan Black will deliver the NASA Keynote/Roosevelt Lecture in Environmental Studies “The Environment and Global American Studies: The Curious Case of the US Interior Department.” The online lecture which will start at 2:30 PM Netherlands (CET) time and can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/3HU30YO.

Professor Black, who teaches at MIT in Boston, is a historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of the award-winning The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power, which analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world—in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. Her new manuscript, tentatively titled “Short-Circuiting Extraction,” will explore anti-mining campaigns in the global 1970s. This project will document how environmentalist groups, local officials, and Indigenous stakeholders adopted increasingly transnational strategies in response to the bids of multinational metals firms to secure minerals underpinning a new communications revolution.

The lecture is sponsored by the Provincie Zeeland