THIS EVENT IS FOR COLUMBIA ALUMNI AND GUESTS ONLY

Victoria Johnson PhD 02 SOAS and an associate professor of Urban Policy & Planning will give a talk to alumni on her fascinating book American Eden. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History and National Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction, American Eden is about David Hosack, the physician who attended the Hamilton-Burr duel and founded the nation's first public botanical garden.

Victoria Johnson is an associate professor of Urban Policy & Planning at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale in 1991 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia in 2002. Before returning to New York City in 2015, she taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for thirteen years.

Her latest book, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Liveright/W. W. Norton), has been called “captivating and intensely readable” by Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton) and “absolutely riveting” by Science Friday’s Ira Flatow. American Eden, a biography of the attending physician at the Hamilton-Burr duel—who founded the nation’s first public botanical garden—has received rave reviews in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Nature, Scientific American, Popular Science, and many other outlets. The book was named a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction, a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, and a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. For more information, see americaneden.org.

Tickets can be purchased here.