SEMO’s English Department will be hosting the annual Robert W. Hamblin lecture in Ballroom A of the University Center on April 27 at 7 p.m. Professor of English Elizabeth Chang will be giving a lecture on “The Global Lives of Nineteenth-Century Plants in Victorian Literature: Ecocriticism and Other Conversations.”

The lecture will be an overview of how plants covertly influence culture and literature and how plants are more active beings than one may think.

Chang is an English professor at the University of Missouri and has completed two novels, edited a five-volume collection and won the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2011.

“Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature and the Global Nineteenth Century,” Chang’s second book, is a place where new ideas and cultures are exchanged, where the exotic is brought to the familiar, and boundaries are pushed.