A talk by Daniel Immerwahr on the historical, political, and biographical contexts of Frank Herbert's science-fiction classic Dune.

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune is one of the best-selling and most influential science-fiction works of all time. Among historians, it's best known for introducing many readers to ecological thinking. But Dune was also about empire. Frank Herbert worked for some of the men who ran America's territorial empire. He also had important friendships with people from the Quileute community, a tribal nation in Western Washington. All of these influences flowed into his writing, inspiring Dune and other of his works. How can connecting these dots help us decode Dune?

Daniel Immerwahr is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. His first book, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (2015), offers a critical account of grassroots development campaigns launched by the U.S. at home and abroad. His second book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019), examines the history of the U.S. with its overseas territories at the center of the story. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in Dissent, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Slate.

This program was a co-production of Northwestern University’s Center for International & Area Studies and the Evanston Public Library.

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