Feast for Thought, An Exploration of Food, Society and the Environment by Engaging the Public Liberal Arts
Feast for Thought, An Exploration of Food, Society and the Environment by Engaging the Public Liberal Arts
The Rural Studies Institute is pleased to invite you to our last 2025 virtual noon-day discussion series, "Feast for Thought, An Exploration of Food, Society and the Environment by Engaging the Public Liberal Arts." Join us for an engaging interdisciplinary discussion with Georgia College & State University experts as we explore the intricate relationships between food systems, cultural practices and our planet. Whether you're passionate about cultural history and food, sustainability and environmental issues, food culture or society’s impact on them, this series will provide a thought-provoking look at how our food choices shape the world around us.
Our featured speaker for April 4, 2025, will be Dr. Katie Simon, associate professor in the English Department at Georgia College, and the interim executive director of the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College & State University. Dr. Simon will provide expertise in environmental humanities, ecological consciousness and the human relationship with nature. Her work is a historical and literary analysis of society and the environment. Additional information about her work is below.
The goal of this unique series is to foster a vibrant dialogue that highlights our faculty, their expertise and the role of the public liberal arts in exploring agrarian traditions and informing public understanding. We hope to inspire new ideas and collaborative efforts that honor the extensive agrarian and rural traditions of the public liberal arts.
For more information, please see the attached promotional flyer.
To register for the April 4, 2025, 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. event, featuring Dr. Katie Simon, please use the link below:
Katie Simon is an associate professor in the English Department at Georgia College, and the interim executive director of the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities. She has also served as the past coordinator for the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and for the MA Program in English at Georgia College. Her research and teaching focuses on American literature, social justice and the environmental humanities. Her work on Thoreau appears in ESQ, and she has work on Flannery O’Connor in Women’s Studies. Pedagogy pieces appear in Bad Subjects: Critical Education for Everyday Life (Pluto Press). She is working on an edited collection entitled Forgotten Spaces: Environmental Justice and the U.S. South and a book on Flannery O’Connor. She has a piece forthcoming in the edited collection Reckoning with Racism and Flannery O’Connor.