Living Deliberately in Isolated Times

Thoreau and Social Distance: Living Deliberately in Isolated Times

Ron Charles, Tom Montgomery Fate, and Laura Dassow Walls think through the consequences of social distancing and isolation, enlightened by the perspective of Henry David Thoreau.

Webinar Host

Laura Dassow WallsLaura Dassow Walls (William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science @University of Notre Dame)
Laura Dassow Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2017, in time to honor Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This book, the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions—fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today.

Specialty: American Transcendentalism; literature and science; environmental literature

Webinar Guests

Ron CharlesRon Charles (Critic @Washington Post)
Ron Charles is a book critic at The Washington Post. His awards include the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award Nona Balakian Citation for book reviews, and 1st Place for A&E Coverage from the Society for Features Journalism in 2011. He was one of three jurors for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Tom Montgomery FateTom Montgomery Fate is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Beyond the White Noise, a collection of essays, Steady and Trembling, a spiritual memoir, and Cabin Fever, a nature memoir. His essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Orion, and Iowa Review, among others.