Monday Seminar:
Rob Nixon
Senior Fellow (2009-2012)
Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW-Madison
Abdelrahman Munif, a Jordanian-born writer of Saudi-Iraqi parentage, gave imaginative definition to the resource wars—over oil, water, and time itself—that have afflicted the Persian Gulf. Against the backdrop of transnational hydrocarbon politics, the climate crisis, the resource curse, and the Arab uprisings, this talk will consider Munif’s prescient vision of socioenvironmental time.
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in spring 2011. Professor Nixon is a frequent contributor to the New York Times; his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian, Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Slate, South Atlantic Quarterly, Transition, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Modern Fiction Studies, New Formations, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.