Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Ben Mendelsohn is the 2018-2020 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. He earned his PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, where his dissertation combined written research with documentary video to examine the urban coastal geology of Lagos, Nigeria. His article, “Making the Urban Coast: A Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos” is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and his public scholarship has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Public Books. He was a 2017-2018 Global Dissertation Fellow at NYU Shanghai, and a 2014 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellow in “Oceanic Studies.”  This lecture is part of the Baraza Lecture Series.