Provost's Lecture Series
A partnership of the Office of the Provost and the OSU Foundation to bring renowned thinkers, writers, scientists, artists and leaders to OSU to engage, challenge and inspire.
Featuring Michael Pollan: Bestselling Author and Sustainable Food Advocate
A Conversation with Michael Pollan
The Provost's Lecture featuring Michael Pollan on April 2 was the second lecture in the 2023-24 series. The event recording will be available until April 30, 2024.
The Provost's Lecture featuring Michael Pollan is the second lecture in the 2023-24 series. Pollan is a bestselling author and sustainable food advocate. Join us for a special Provost's Lecture event in which Michael Pollan will engage in an in-depth conversation with Oregon State's own Emily Ho, University Distinguished Professor of Nutrition in the College of Health and Director of the Linus Pauling Institute. Following their discussion, Dr. Ho will moderate a Q&A with the audience.
For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds.
Pollan is the author of nine books, seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers; four of them, including his latest This is Your Mind on Plants, were immediate New York Times bestsellers. Previous books include How to Change Your Mind (2019), Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), which was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His most recent book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the taboos we place on them, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2021.
A four-hour Netflix miniseries based on Cooked premiered in February 2016. PBS presented a two-hour special documentary based on The Botany of Desire in 2009 and a two-hour documentary based on In Defense of Food was broadcast nationally in 2015 and was nominated for an Emmy. Pollan appeared in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc., which was partly based on The Omnivore's Dilemma, and is currently working on a sequel to Food Inc..
A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, Pollan's writing has received numerous awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003; the John Burroughs prize; the QPB Nwe Vision Award; the 2014 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award; the 2015 Washington University Humanities Medal; and the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace in 2010. In 2009, Pollan was named one of the top 10 "New Thought Leaders" by Newsweek magazine and in 2010 was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Pollan has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gastronomic Science and in 2015 was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. He retired as the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism, and co-founder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard and the university's first Lewis Chan Lecturer in the Arts.
Michael Pollan holds degrees from Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University.
Upcoming Speakers
Margaret Atwood
November 19, 2024
CeĢline Cousteau
March 10, 2025
Previous Speakers
W. Kamau Bell
January 31, 2019
Michael Beschloss
November 10, 2015
Richard Besser
April 13, 2015
Robin Chase
March 8, 2017
David Eagleman
October 27, 2021
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
November 9, 2020
Diana B. Henriques
March 14, 2024
Mae C. Jemison
February 4, 2021
Mary Karr
April 13, 2022
Ibram X. Kendi
April 14, 2021
Maya Lin
April 26, 2018
Ruth Reichl
February 17, 2016
Laurie Santos
April 4, 2023
Cheryl Strayed
January 15, 2015
Sam Quinones
November 14, 2022