Land of Good Men with Professor Lucas Bessire
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About the lecture:
How do upheavals of masculinity, democracy, and ecology converge on the American Great Plains? What kind of scholarly engagements can contribute to reclaiming a shared reality at this pivotal historical moment? To explore how these questions relate to genres of exposition, this talk excavates the emotional and environmental terrain of the author’s family homestead located along western Oklahoma’s Hundredth Meridian, where tensions of holding on and letting go accrete over generations and point the way to wider reckonings with the contemporary.
Lucas Bessire is an American writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. Drawing on extensive field research in the Gran Chaco, the Arctic and the High Plains, his writing explores the lived experience of contemporary environmental and social changes and seeks ways to communicate his findings to wider publics. A fifth-generation Kansan, Lucas graduated from Kansas State University before earning his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from New York University. He has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow of both Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Among other films, essays and articles, he is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press 2014), and Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press 2021), which won seven prizes and was named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction. In 2023-24, Lucas was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently, he is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines.