June 3, 2020 update: Dr. Armstead will keynote the AESS virtual event. The event date has been changed to July 15, 2020.
Each year AESS holds an opening reception with keynote address. This year, the Association has the pleasure of hosting Myra Young Armstead who plans to give a speech titled Unleashing the Power of an Interdisciplinary Landscape, Environmental Studies.
Myra Young Armstead is Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College, where she has served both on the Steering Committee of the Environmental and Urban Studies (EUS) Program and as an EUS-affiliate faculty member. Trained as an Americanist who explores the complexities of the urban-rural nexus, she has taught courses on urban disasters, the suburban ideal, urban history, African Americans and cities, and the history of horticulture as practice, social lens, and cultural idea in the United States.
She has published on rural resorts towns as specialized urban places, geographies of freedom, and antebellum gardening. One current book project views early twentieth century Harlem at the point of its emergence as a diasporic black and Caribbean neighborhood in the 1920s to reveal how the existing built environment was deployed by new activist publics to take on new cultural meanings. In a second project, she is revising historical meanings conventionally assigned to the structures and land constituting Schuyler House and Estate in Saratoga National Park from the viewpoint of eighteenth and early nineteenth century slaves.
Read more about Myra Young Armstead here: https://www.bard.edu/dei/about/
Dr. Armstead will be giving the Keynote at the 2020 AESS Opening Reception in the evening on Wednesday, June 10 at Pace University in New York City.