Coffee and Conversation Program - Florida and the Gulf of Mexico: Wisdom, History, and Hope

Coffee and Conversation Program - Florida and the Gulf of Mexico: Wisdom, History, and Hope 

Thursday, January 12th - 7:00 - 8:30 p.m. at the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum in downtown Inverness on the Square

University of Florida history professor Jack E. Davis looks at the role the Gulf of Mexico has played in the course of Florida history. He is interested in the way people, from the pre-Spanish Indians to Florida’s current residents, have organized their societies and individual lives around nature, and how Gulf nature has been a positive force in human events. Unfortunately, human activities have sometimes led to unintended consequences that have undermined the Gulf's beneficence.

Jack E. Davis is a professor of history at the University of Florida. He previously taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was director of environmental studies, and at Eckerd College. For the academic year 2002-2003, he was a Fulbright scholar in Amman, Jordan, where he taught American studies in the graduate school at the University of Jordan. His research and teaching interests include U. S. social and environmental history with a focus on the twentieth-century South. He received a doctorate in history from Brandeis University in 1994.

Davis is the author of An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009), recipient of the gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. He has published articles in several scholarly journals, including Environmental History, and has presented papers and served on panels at two dozen conferences. He is also a regular public speaker for the Florida Humanities Council and a contributor to the its magazine, Forum, for which he has won two Charlie awards (first place) for best feature writing and best in-depth reporting for his 2011 article “The Gulf of Mexico: An Ancient Power Central to Our Lives.” He is currently writing a book on the environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico.

Please call (352) 341-6436 to reserve your seat today!