Thoreau's Sense of Time - Kristen Case
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Free and open to the public. There will be a welcome reception with food and drinks at noon.
Fresh off her starring role in the Ken Burns documentary "Henry David Thoreau," which aired on PBS nationwide in March 2026, Kristen Case will visit the UNE Biddeford Campus for this lecture exploring Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with time as an environmental, personal, and political dimension of experience.
While Thoreau is often celebrated for his environmental imagination, this talk focuses on his temporal imagination — his effort to resist the thin, linear time of industrial capitalism and reclaim a richer, cyclical sense of duration rooted in the natural world. At the heart of this inquiry is Thoreau’s late-life project, the Kalendar, a series of charts tracking seasonal phenomena across years, designed to reveal patterns of recurrence and change in the more-than-human world.
The lecture will argue that Thoreau’s attention to time and seasonality offers a powerful model for rethinking our relationship to the worlds we occupy and create.
BIOGRAPHY
Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of "Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Seasonal Phenomena" (Milkweed Editions, 2025) and "Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe" (Camden House, 2011). She has also published three books of poetry, most recently, "Daphne" (Tupelo Press, 2025). She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers, including the "Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau," forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Professor Case is also the founding executive director of the Monson Seminar, a three-week course and artist residency program for college students pursuing creative and research-based projects in Monson, Maine, which is accredited through the University of Southern Maine.
Harold Alfond Forum, Room 283
UNE Biddeford Campus
630 Pool Street
Biddeford, ME 04005
United States
FMI: https://www.une.edu/events/2026/thoreaus-sense-time
Fresh off her starring role in the Ken Burns documentary "Henry David Thoreau," which aired on PBS nationwide in March 2026, Kristen Case will visit the UNE Biddeford Campus for this lecture exploring Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with time as an environmental, personal, and political dimension of experience.
While Thoreau is often celebrated for his environmental imagination, this talk focuses on his temporal imagination — his effort to resist the thin, linear time of industrial capitalism and reclaim a richer, cyclical sense of duration rooted in the natural world. At the heart of this inquiry is Thoreau’s late-life project, the Kalendar, a series of charts tracking seasonal phenomena across years, designed to reveal patterns of recurrence and change in the more-than-human world.
The lecture will argue that Thoreau’s attention to time and seasonality offers a powerful model for rethinking our relationship to the worlds we occupy and create.
BIOGRAPHY
Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of "Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Seasonal Phenomena" (Milkweed Editions, 2025) and "Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe" (Camden House, 2011). She has also published three books of poetry, most recently, "Daphne" (Tupelo Press, 2025). She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers, including the "Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau," forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Professor Case is also the founding executive director of the Monson Seminar, a three-week course and artist residency program for college students pursuing creative and research-based projects in Monson, Maine, which is accredited through the University of Southern Maine.
Harold Alfond Forum, Room 283
UNE Biddeford Campus
630 Pool Street
Biddeford, ME 04005
United States
FMI: https://www.une.edu/events/2026/thoreaus-sense-time
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Where is it happening?
University of New England Harold Alfond Forum, 1 Noreaster Way, Biddeford, ME 04005, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherUNE Center for Global Humanities
