Dr. Karen Salt delivered two lectures for the students of the College of Foreign Studies on November 14 and 15 after she arrived at the College of Foreign Studies. Both of the lectures were hosted by associate professor Fan Shuying.

First, a lecture titled “Twilight Islands and Environmental Crisis” was given by Dr. Salt on the afternoon of November 14. Based on the comprehensive research of many small islands of the Caribbean, which are still unnamed and without national boundaries, the lecture went over the relationship between race, region and the disciplines of environment and humanity. Dr. Salt has been working on this subject for many years and made great achievements in the research of the Caribbean with teams of internationally distinguished scholars from many disciplines, including oceanography, philosophy, literature, history, ecology, and anthropology.

The next afternoon, Dr. Salt delivered another lecture entitled “Frederick Douglass, Marie Vieux Chauvet and the Re-making of American Literature”. Taking two writers of ethnic literature, she analyzed the importance of the shaping, recording and writing of individual voice, image, and experience in American literature. She also mentioned that in the 1980s when she was still a student, many new theoretical perspectives including ethnic literature, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist literary theory arose, and impacted her own course of study. At the end of the lecture, she encouraged students to speak out and compose their own life experience as a branch of the main stream of the whole text of humankind.

Both of the lectures were beneficial to a wide audience, which helped to widen the field of view and thinking, and also had great significance for learning the combination of academic research and theoretical perspective. Teachers and students actively raised questions, to which Dr. Salt answered conscientiously.