Beinecke Fellowship Program Symposium: Rachel Carson in the Archives

In connection with the upcoming exhibition Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision, the Beinecke Library Fellowship Program is sponsoring a full day of programming featuring recent alumni of the program whose research has drawn on the Rachel Carson Papers. The day will commence with a panel discussion featuring Janice Nimura (25-26 Short-term Fellow), Michele Navakas (24-25 Short-term Fellow), and Zak Breckenridge (24-25 Graduate Student Fellow), and will be followed by a curator-led tour of the exhibition.

 

Event Schedule: 

 

10:30 am–1 pm | Rachel Carson in the Archives: A Panel Discussion

Featuring Beinecke Fellows Zak Breckenridge, Michele Navakas, and Janice Nimura, moderated by Paul Sabin, Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History and Professor of American Studies.

Sterling Memorial Library -- Lecture Hall

Lunch provided, registration required

 

1:30 pm–3 pm | Rachel Carson Materials Viewing Session

Beinecke Library -- Classroom 38–39

No registration required

 

3:30 pm–4:30 pm | Exhibition Tour

Tour of Silent Springs, Windswept Seas by curators Carla Baricz and James Kessenides

Beinecke Library -- Lobby

No registration required

 

Rachel Carson Panel: Presenter Information

 

Zak Breckenridge is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California. His dissertation, Composing Ecology: Science and Literature in the Making of Environmental Thought, studies the two-way traffic between science and literature in the work of Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wallace Stegner. His writing has recently appeared in Western American Literature, Public Books, and Edge Effects. He hosts the podcast “Erratics,” which examines the future of liberal education by reflecting on the history and legacy of the recently shuttered Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

 

Michele Navakas is Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her books include Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), winner of two book awards from the Florida Historical Society. She is currently at work on a book titled Rachel Carson Reading, and she will join the English Department at the University of San Diego in fall 2026.

 

Janice P. Nimura’s current project, Knowing Her Place: Rachel Carson and the Women Who Came Before Her, is under contract to Random House and has been supported by residencies at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Bogliasco Center, Yaddo, and Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment. She is the author of The Doctors Blackwell, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography and a New York Times bestseller, and Daughters of the Samurai, a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and a proud Yale English major.