Lunn Lecture Dives Into the Meaning of Rivers

Rivers are full of meaning, but their depth cannot match the meaning when we see glimmers of our own lives moving beneath the surface.

Robert Pogue Harrison, professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, will follow this and other ideas in this year’s Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture “What is a River? Nature, Culture, and the Human Psyche.” The lecture takes place at the Jan and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on Jan. 31 at 4 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Harrison has written widely on global intellectual history and cultural figures from ancient times to the present. His most well-known book is Forests (Chicago, 1992), in which he conducts a wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought at a time of ongoing ecological disaster. He has also taken a similar approach with gardens, adolescence and other ideas that help him to delineate some of the meaning bound up with being human.

Harrison also hosts the popular podcast Entitled Opinions (About Life and Literature), on which he has interviewed leading figures in literature, philosophy, science and cultural history for the past decade.

Harrison received his doctorate from Cornell University and joined the Stanford Department of French and Italian in 1986. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic.

Thirty years of Lunn Lectures at UC Davis

Over the last 30 years, the Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture, hosted by the UC Davis Department of History in the College of Letters and Science, has brought leading speakers who address intellectual or cultural history. Previous speakers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff, New Yorker essayist Louis Menand and the late philosopher Richard Rorty.

“Eugene Lunn’s colleagues created this lecture series to bring in important speakers who could address important issues in terms that would reach the general public,” said Michael Saler, a professor of history who curates the annual lecture series.