2026 Gras Lecture in the Environmental Humanities
Thursday, April 16, 2026 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, Main Reading Room
This year’s Gras Lecture in the Humanities welcome Ashley Dawson, Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism, and he is also founder of the Mellon-funded Climate Action Lab at CUNY.
Dawson’s books include Extinction: A Radical History (2016), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (2017), and People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (2020), praised by Lavinia Steinfort of the Transnational Institute as “A brilliant guide to building collective, equitable, and radical energy democracies in the here and now.”
The Vernon and Marguerite Gras Lecture in the Environmental Humanities Series has previously hosted writers and thinkers including Joshua Bennett, David Orr, T. Collin Campbell, Fritjof Capra, Jorie Graham, Wendy Wheeler, Robert E. Singleton, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Martin Puchner, and Ursula K. Heise.
Vernon Gras is a professor emeritus of English and Literature at George Mason University and the founder of the George Mason University Press. Marguerite Gras was a legislative research staffer at the U.S. House of Representatives, 1974–1991.
Hosted by George Mason's English Department.
