Dr. Amy Kohout, assistant professor of History at Colorado College, will deliver a public talk and participate in a manuscript workshop as part of the McCabe Greer manuscript workshop and Many Wests book series. The public talk will be held on February 28, followed by the workshop the next day. Both events will take place at the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus. Dr. Kohout is a cultural and environmental historian, and her talk will be titled, “Taking the Field: the Collecting Work of Dr. Edgar Alexander Mearns.” Mearns was a US Army surgeon and naturalist who served in the US West and the Philippines around the turn of the last century. In her talk, Kohout will use Mearns’s career to examine the intersection of scientific and military work and explore the interplay of ideas about nature and empire in this period.

The talk is drawn from a book manuscript that will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in their Many Wests series. During the workshop, Dr. Kohout, the editors of the book series, and workshop participants will critique her manuscript in preparation for its future publication. The forthcoming book is tentatively titled, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers. The talk and workshop are sponsored by the McCabe Greer Professorship, the Richards Center, the Department of History, and the University of Nebraska Press.

Interested participants can register for the event by contacting the Richards Center at RichardsCenter@psu.edu by February 20.