The Destructive Potential of Humans’ Affinity for Green Spaces: Vin Nardizzi at Loyola Feb. 19

Ecocritic Vin Nardizzi will present a lecture “The Grass is Greener” at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, in the Whitney Presentation Room at Loyola University New Orleans (6363 St. Charles Ave.).

Nardizzi’s lecture will examine the destructive potential of humans’ affinity for green spaces. Taking examples from postwar narratives of killer plants that attack humans, Nardizzi offers a critique of what he calls “lawn mentality”—the impulse to fabricate, enclose, and protect green spaces—and the ideologies of privilege and power that sustain such impulses.

Nardizzi the author of the forthcoming book Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees and he co-edited the books Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze and The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. He is assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches Renaissance literature, ecocriticism, and queer and disability studies.