Craig E. Colten, the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University, will give a talk at Vanderbilt University entitled “Race and Relief in New Orleans: A Hazardous Topography” at 4:10 p.m. on January 26, 2006. His talk will focus on the impact of New Orleans’s environmental and social legacies on the human costs of Hurricane Katrina and the quality of the local and national response. Professor Colten is the author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), an interdisciplinary examination of New Orleans’s long battles with its environs. In the book, Colton traces the many modifications to the city’s natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Each structural manipulation of the environment had an impact on the city’s social geography as well. Colten’s work introduces an important environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. Colten’s other publications include Transforming New Orleans and Its
Environs, The American Environment, The Road to Love Canal, and Louisiana Geography.

The program is cosponsored by the Warren Center and the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies as part of an annual lecture series that highlights work in the humanities or social sciences that has a direct effect on public policy.