Update: A video recording of Ehrenreich's lecture is now available for viewing online.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the outspoken feminist, journalist, activist and writer, will give the annual Media@McGill Beaverbrook Annual Lecture on Thursday, 18 November, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. This free, public lecture will be held at the Stewart Biology Building, Room S 1/4, 1205 Dr. Penfield, Montreal. (map)
Title: Reinforcing the Culture of Optimism
Journalist, historian, and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fifteen books. In 2001, Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (Metropolitan Books) became a New York Times bestseller, and has since sold over one million copies. Nickel and Dimed, a trenchant examination of working-class poverty that chronicles Ehrenreich's own attempt to live on minimum wage, is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities, from University of the Ozarks to Yale University to Western Wyoming Community College. In 2005, Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, also a New York Times bestseller, exposed the ever more prevalent phenomenon of white-collar unemployment. In 2008, Metropolitan books published This Land Is Their Land, a collection of her published columns. Ehrenreich's most recent book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, was published by Metropolitan Books in October, 2009.
A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, Ehrenreich has been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine. In 2004, she received the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship, given annually to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance." Ehrenreich lives near Washington, DC.