Gras Lecture in the Environmental Humanities
Thursday, April 16, 2026 7:30 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, Reading Room
Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at the College of Staten Island, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities.
Dawson was the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, where he worked on a series of photographs and short films about the struggle to abolish polluting power plants in New York. He is currently a resident fellow at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York, where he is co-curating an exhibit on infrastructures of energy transition in the city.
Dawson has published numerous books and articles on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Prior to these books, he wrote about capitalism and the biodiversity crisis in Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Books, 2016), and about urbanization, inequality, and climate collapse in Extreme Cities (Verso, 2017).
He is a member of Public Power NY, a movement for a just, publicly controlled energy transition in New York and beyond. He wrote about this work in People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R Books, 2020).
