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The Environment and Sustainability Program invites you to the closing lecture of our annual spring series by guest speaker Dr. Evan M. Mwangi under this year's theme, “Environmental voices from the margins.” Dr. Evan Maina Mwangi is Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies; Professor of English; and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of English at Northwestern University. Dr. Mwangi has published on Nazizi Hirji, Chinua Achebe, K. Sello Duiker, Amandina Lihamba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, David Maillu, Henry ole Kulet, Margaret Ogola, and Francis Imbuga, among other postcolonial artists and intellectuals. His articles and poems have appeared in Mwangaza, TDR: The Drama Review, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, English Studies in Africa, The Nairobi Journal of Literature, PMLA, and Africa Today. His most recent monograph, The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics (Michigan, 2019), examines the interface of critical animal studies and postcolonial literature to bring to the fore the vegan impulses in African writing and demonstrates that these vegan motivations and affects are not a copy of western practices but draw from indigenous sources. By including work by East African writers such as Rebecca Nandwa, Nuruddin Farah, Henry ole Kulet, and Yuda Komora in its study of the figure of the animal in African literature, the book seeks to debunk the implied belief in critical animal studies that only white African writers (exemplified by J.M. Coetzee) have been attentive to the animal question. Dr. Mwangi is currently at work on two new book projects: one exploring the global re-writings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the other on Indian Ocean literatures and philosophies.