Nan Kim, UWM associate professor of history and co-chair of the public history program, has been selected for the 2024 Morris Fromkin Memorial Grant and Lecture.
Her proposal is titled “Environmental Crisis and Social Justice in the New Nuclear Age: Reappraising the Legacies of Rachel Carson and Jonathon Schell.”
Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982), Kim notes, “inspired the modern environmental movement and the nuclear-freeze movement respectively.”
The primary goal of her project, she writes, “is to trace generations of scholarly thought and social activism, connecting the present with past movements. Another chief aim is to share new empirical research and critically informed interpretations of ongoing developments to argue how both writers offer a critical source of guidance for principled advocacy on behalf of the world’s ecologies and their intertwined human and nonhuman communities.”
The amount of the grant is $5,000. This year’s Fromkin committee members were Rachel Baum, Michael Doylen, Robin Mello, Ermitte Saint Jacques, Juchuan Wang, and Max Yela.
Kim will present the results of her research at the Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture lecture in fall 2024.
Established by Morris Fromkin’s family and supported by an endowment from Fromkin’s grandson, Daniel Soyer, the lecture series, dedicated to social justice, is the longest running lecture series on campus. The program is administered by the UWM Libraries.