The Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College hosts a free public lecture on Thursday, October 1, 2026 by Dr. Robert Macfarlane, Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge.
Macfarlane is a well-known writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and his award-winning books—which include Is a River Alive? (2025), Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and Mountains of the Mind (2003)—have been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theatre.
He has also written operas, plays, and films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020), and The Book of Birds (2026). As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023) and an EP, Six Signs (2022). In 2022, with the actor-director Simon McBurney he co-adapted Susan Cooper’s classic fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising into a twelve-part BBC audio drama series.
Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction.
The Rhodes event begins at 6 p.m. in the McNeill Concert Hall (West Campus).
This event is free and open to the public, but attendees must pre-register using this link: https://fs22.formsite.com/webmanagerrhodesedu/muajlptegz/index
As part of his visit to the Rhodes campus, Macfarlane will also introduce a free public screening of his documentary film Underland (Wednesday, September 30, 7pm, Blount Auditorium).
Those with specific inquiries about Macfarlane’s Rhodes events can contact Dr. Scott Newstok, executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities, at WilsonCenter@rhodes.edu
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Dr. Scott Newstok, professor of English and executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College, is moving to Spain as part of a new research role at the University of Murcia. Newstok has been awarded a four-year grant from Spain’s State Research Agency to lead the humanities project TWINS – Twinomials: History of the Residual Bilingualism and Philological Citizenship in Shakespeare’s England. This work will examine the historical development of English as a hybrid language through the lens of early modern legal, religious, political, and literary texts, connecting past linguistic contact with contemporary debates on identity and multiculturalism.
According to Dr. Newstok, contemporary debates about English as an ‘official language’ overlook the radical hybridity of English itself, traces of which remain extant in its remarkable lexicon. “My project synthesizes enduring humanistic practices (close reading, etymology, literary history) with computational methods to revisit the landmarks of English literary production—not only Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, but also biblical translation, administrative formulae, and the first dictionaries—as the rich outgrowth of an ongoing ‘denization’ of other languages.”
To conduct this research, Newstok will return to the institution that hosted him as a 2022 Fulbright Scholar, the University of Murcia, whose Department of English Philology includes faculty cohorts in Renaissance culture as well as digital corpus studies of historical sociolinguistics. A Fellow of the English Association, Newstok is editing Michel de Montaigne’s educational writings with award-winning translator Tess Lewis. He spoke about this project upon receipt of the 2025 Parnassus Prize, and he is currently teaching a Rhodes seminar devoted to Montaigne’s legacy.
Dr. Newstok and his family have been a special part of Memphis and we wish them all well in this exciting new chapter.
