CSU Dominguez Hills’ Visiting Distinguished Scholar
To Give Public Lecture on Upcoming Book on Feb. 4

William L. Fox, California State University, Dominguez Hills' Visiting Distinguished Scholar, will deliver a lecture on his upcoming book, Aereality: The World From Above on Monday, Feb. 4 at 5:30 p.m. in the Loker Student Union.

Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations. He is the first visiting distinguished scholar at CSU Dominguez Hills.

During Fox's stint on campus last semester, Aereality: The World From Above was just one of the writing projects he worked on. One section of the book will focus on the western United States and examine California’s deserts and the urban landscape of the Los Angeles region. On his web site, www.wlfox.net, Fox explains how he came up with the idea.

“While working in extreme environments, in particular the polar regions, I have increasingly depended upon and written about aerial images, but never examined them as a class of images in their own right,” he says. “This series of linked essays seeks to fill that gap, and this is my major research project through early 2008. I'll be looking into and writing about aerial images from as far back as 6,000 B.C. up to current remote sensing technologies. Among the topics I'll cover are: How pre-technological people envision the Earth from above; the history of aerial perspective in Renaissance painting; the development of commercial and military aerial photography; how that is used by archeologists; and how contemporary artists conduct photography from aircraft.”

Fox has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than 70 magazines, has had 14 collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eight nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. He has taught rock climbing at the University of Nevada, as well as led treks in the Himalaya.

Fox has worked as a team member of NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project, which tests methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. He was a visiting scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, has twice been a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for
the Humanities.

For more information, contact (310) 243-3845.

- Amy Bentley-Smith