Author and Activist Rebecca Solnit Headlines RIT’s Next Gannett Lecture

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Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, a noted environmental activist and political writer, headlines the next Caroline Werner Gannet Project lecture at RIT.

Solnit presents ‘Other Loves: Public Life and Unsaid Emotions’ at 8 p.m. Nov. 4 in RIT’s Webb Auditorium. She will also give a public reading from her current work, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster at 4 p.m. Nov. 4 at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave. in Rochester.

“One of our most gifted cultural historians, Rebecca Solnit moves nimbly from the personal to the analytical in her passionate commitment to a civil society and social justice in the face of world poverty, mass violence and environmental devastation,” says Mary Lynn Broe, the Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities and director of the Gannett project at RIT.

Solnit is the best-selling author of 12 books, including River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize, both in 2003. She was also honored with the 2004 Wired Rave Award for her writings on technology and has previously received a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

In addition, Solnit served as a contributing editor for Harper’s, Orion and Tomdispatch.com, and has participated in numerous grassroots campaigns in the anti-nuclear, anti-war, environmental and human-rights movements.

Broe created the Caroline Werner Gannett Project in 2006 and, with the interdisciplinary Gannett Working Group, brings to campus high-profile speakers in the “Visionaries in Motion” series, now in its third season. The Gannett project also sponsors colloquia and workshops, in conjunction with its speakers, all of which explore new connections across the sciences, technologies, social sciences and humanities. All Gannett events are free and open to the public.