NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Sandra Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health, will speak Thursday, April 20, at 6 p.m. at The Belcourt Theater in Hillsboro Village.
The lecture, “Contamination Without Consent: How Chemicals in Air, Food and Water Violate Human Rights,” is sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
The event is free to those with Vanderbilt identification. Tickets for the general public are $10 and are currently available at The Belcourt Theater’s box office.
Steingraber is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, a book that presents cancer as a human rights issue and brings together data on toxic releases with information released from U.S. cancer registries. The book won praise from The Washington Post, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Lancet and The London Times.
Her latest book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, is both a memoir of her own pregnancy and a look at the extent to which environmental hazards now threaten each crucial stage of infant development. The Library Journal selected Having Faith as one of its best books of 2001. In 2002, the book was featured on “Kids and Chemicals,” a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers.
Other books by Steingraber include Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry, and The Spoils of Famine, a work she co-authored on ecology and human rights in Africa.
She has taught biology at Columbia College, Chicago, and held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard and Northeastern University. She also worked on President Bill Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer.
Formerly on the faculty at Cornell University, Steingraber is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Ithaca College in New York.
For more news about Vanderbilt, visit VUCast – Vanderbilt’s News Network at www.vanderbilt.edu/news.
Media Contact: Princine Lewis, 615-322-NEWS
Princine.l.lewis@vanderbilt.edu