The Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities’ fall lecture will feature guest speaker Maria Farland, an associate professor at Fordham University.

Farland’s lecture charts the affinities between the Dickinson family’s involvement in the founding of the land-grant Massachusetts College of Agriculture and related agricultural modernization efforts: scientific education, the invention of new plant species, the improvement of soil conditions and the rise of technical expertise.

Farland argues that Dickinson’s poems took shape around efforts to improve and remake farming in communities like Amherst. Dickinson’s poems often critique the highly speculative agricultural ventures that engaged her family, along with the new forms of rural expertise (botany, horticulture, and geology) that took hold in Amherst and other communities in these years. Poems like “A faded Boy — in sallow Clothes” and “Perhaps you’d like to buy a flower” depict a highly unstable rural world, and the poet’s multiform responses — comedic, satiric, somber — to these upheavals in the agrarian economy.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A with the speaker. Refreshments will be served.

Attendance is free and registration is not required. Contact ceah@iastate.edu with questions.