James C. Scott, director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, will present “In Praise of Floods: The Study of Rivers and Civilization” on Mar. 20 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Scott’s books include Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,  Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist  History of Upland Southeast Asia, among other titles. A political scientist and anthropologist, Scott studies political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale, and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.