After the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us, legendary environmental thinker Rachel Carson settled in Southport, Maine. The married couple Dorothy and Stanley Freeman had a cottage nearby, and the trio quickly became friends. Their extensive and evocative correspondence shows that Dorothy and Rachel did something more: they fell in love.

In this event, Lida Maxwell will explore how their love unsettled their heteronormative ideas of bourgeois life, and how this enabled Carson to develop an increasingly critical view of capitalism’s dangerous and loveless exhaustion of both nonhuman nature and human lives alike. As Maxwell will argue, it was this evolution that set the scene for Carson’s masterpiece, Silent Spring, the legacy of which is to offer us a path toward a more loving use of nature and a transformative political desire that should inform our approach to contemporary environmental crises.

Lida Maxwell is Professor of Political Science & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She is the author or editor of numerous books, the latest of which, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, is published by Stanford University Press.  
Book: https://www.sup.org/books/literary-studies-and-literature/rachel-carson-and-power-queer-love

Isabelle Laurenzi is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Yale University and a 2023-2024 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow. Her dissertation draws on theories of political consciousness and action, as well as feminist critiques of domination and power.
Website: https://www.isabellelaurenzi.com