Tuesday, March 5, 2019
6:15 p.m.
Instructional Centre, Room 140
University of Toronto Mississauga (MAP)
Registration is closed.
Join us for an evening with Kate Harris—writer, adventurer and author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road.
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.
To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Somewhere in between sneaking illegally across Tibet, studying the history of science and exploration at Oxford, and staring down a microscope for a doctorate at MIT, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. So Harris quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Yule, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end.
Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.
Lands of Lost Borders has been shortlisted for a 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, was awarded the Banff Mountain Book Award for Adventure Travel, and has been featured on U.S. National Public Radio, in the Globe and Mail, and the New York Times Book Review. Copies of Lands of Lost Borders will be available for purchase at the event.
Hosted by the U of T Mississauga Department of English and Drama with generous support from the U of T Mississauga Department of Anthropology.
Registration is closed.
Complimentary parking available in lot P9 for the duration of the event (view parking map).
Please contact Melissa Gniadek, associate professor, Department of English and Drama, if you require information in an alternate format, or if any other arrangements can make this event accessible to you.
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