Professor Peter Newman Curtin Professorial Lecture

Join us for the third and final Curtin University Faculty of Humanities Professoriate Lecture for 2023, to conclude a series that showcases the depth and breadth of Faculty’s world-renowned academic researchers.

By acknowledging and celebrating their achievements through their stories and lived experiences, our aim is to enrich and inspire the audience and our next generation of eminent Curtin professors.

Introducing Professor Peter Newman AO

“Can we dare to hope? would be the title of my memoir if I could ever get around to stopping work. But the issues I have been writing on since the early 1970’s are now so rapidly mainstreaming that I find it hard to stop. My lecture will show the journey from working with the great apocalyptic ecologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University in the early 70’s who saw no hope in the future and how I slowly worked out how to hope through my family, community, government secondments, IPCC and over 50 years in universities. I will tell some stories of how hope was embraced in transport and urban planning, environmental campaigns, and sustainability strategies, before the biggest challenge of all, climate change”.

Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University and a member of the Anglican Ecocare Commission. Peter has written 23 books and over 400 papers on sustainable cities and decarbonisation policy. He created the term automobile dependence in the 1980’s which is now standard terminology in urban planning and his book with Jeff Kenworthy has been called ‘one of the most influential planning books of all time’.

We hope that you will join us and take this opportunity to enjoy the company of a diverse and likeminded audience in a relaxed, informal, collegiate atmosphere. We invite you to meet Professor Newman and appreciate the wealth of achievement in the Humanities Faculty at Curtin.

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