Lectures

Part of the History Lecture Series: River Histories. Flowing more than 4,000 miles from the highland lakes of East Africa to the Mediterranean, the Nile is Africa’s longest river. Ancient Egyptians honored the river as a god, building temples along its banks and revering the animals nourished by its waters. This lecture examines how the Nile’s geography and ecology underpinned the development of Ancient Egypt; it will also show how the river’s association with divinity has endured beyond antiquity.

Part of the History Lecture Series: River Histories. Over the centuries, the Ganges and its tributaries have also been a major natural resource for the highly developed states and societies that emerged in their basins, in recent times supporting a significant proportion of India’s huge population. A source of sustenance—and irrigation, transportation, and power—the Ganges story is about the fascinating and complex dynamics between its waters and religion, culture, economy, politics, and environment.

Part of the History Lecture Series: River Histories. The power of the Rio Grande derived from its capacity to inspire reflection on the proper boundaries between peoples, nations, and races—boundaries negotiated in words but also through violence. Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans all found in the Rio a place to envision the outline of a new global order.

Part of the History Lecture Series: River Histories. An artery of indigenous commerce, a nexus of the fur trade, a power source for war work, and a water source for industrial-scale agriculture, the mighty Columbia is now home to one of the world’s most notable concentrations of data centers. These enormous facilities, owned and operated by the world’s largest technology companies, are the physical backbone that make cloud computing, social networking, and AI possible.