Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Gavin Jones in Conversation with Daniel Lanza Rivers
Stanford Department of English
Stanford American Studies Program
Based on Professor Gavin Jones's recent book about John Steinbeck, this conversation will consider the author's relevance to our contemporary world and his interest in pressing issues such as climate change, ecology, social injustice and the fate of humanity on a precarious planet.
Speakers
Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University. He specializes in American literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. With a B.A. from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, he also held a three-year fellowship in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows before coming to Stanford in 1999 as an assistant professor.
Daniel Lanza Rivers is an assistant professor of American Studies & Literature at San José State University, where they also serve as Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Daniel teaches courses in U.S. literature, cultural studies, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. Their research also explores the ways that settlers’ ideas about California's “natural” state have shaped the region’s environments, communities, and literary cultures since colonization. Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Apogee, Joyland, American Quarterly, and Women’s Studies, where they edited the special issue “Futures of Feminist Science Studies.”