Source: John Harrington Jr., 785-532-3405, jharrin@k-state.edu
News release prepared by: Jessica Grant, 785-532-6415, jgrant@k-state.edu
Monday, March 10, 2008
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIAN TO LECTURE AT K-STATE ON THE HUMAN FOOTPRINT OF AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENT
MANHATTAN -- Ken Sylvester, a quantitative environmental historian at the University of Michigan, will present the lecture "Footprints of Settlement: Making Agricultural Landscapes in the American Grasslands" at Kansas State University.
His lecture will be at noon Thursday, March 13, in Room 212 of the K-State Student Union. The lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the K-State department of geography and its student honorary society, Gamma Theta Upsilon.
"Ken is a really neat guy who has a mind-set that deals with how we've dealt with the environment and what it means for the people who live in certain areas -- and he can put that information to numbers," said John Harrington Jr., K-State professor of geography. "He is able to not only assess the historical numbers about where people are living and what they are doing in an area, but he also goes to written sources to find out about the nature of the people living in those areas."
Sylvester earned his doctorate from York University and is currently a research scientist with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.
His research interests include environmental history, historical demography, agricultural land use and rural social history. He is an active social science contributor to the Long-term Ecological Research program and is currently has funding from the National Institutes of Health for his work on demography and environment in grassland settlement and for a new project that will assess population and environment in the Great Plains.
"This is very much a student-oriented lecture, but it should appeal to anyone with an interest in geography, the environment or the history of Kansas," Harrington said.