Panel: Outliers and Environmental Literary Criticism

Date/Time:	Monday, 27 Feb 2012 at 10:00 am
Location:	Campanile Room, Memorial Union
Cost:	Free
Contact:
Phone:	515-294-9934
Channel:	Lecture Series
Categories:	Conferences Lectures
Actions:	Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder

Three literary critics from the Iowa State Department of English will discuss the concept of the environmental imagination in literature. Participants include assistant professors Brianna Burke and Matthew Sivils and lecturer Jeremy Withers. Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination.

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Reciprocity: What Environmentalists Can Learn from Native American Literature
Brianna Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Iowa State. Her academic interests are in the environmental humanities, including ecocriticism and multicultural ecologies, but she is particularly invested in environmental justice. She is the author of two articles, "Fighting Reds Onscreen and Off-screen: Ronald Reagan as Cold War Politician and Cowboy in Cattle Queen of Montana," and "The Great American Love Affair: Indians in the Twilight Saga," both of which examine representations of Native Americans in popular culture. Currently she is working on a book that explores the intersections between environmental ethics and Native American cultural and religious traditions.

Of Outliers and Archives: Tracking Paul L. Errington's Of Men and Marshes
Matthew Wynn Sivils, formerly a wildlife biologist, is now an assistant professor of English at Iowa State, where he teaches American literature before 1900, as well as courses devoted to American environmental literature from all periods. He has published several scholarly articles on topics in those specializations and has edited three scholarly editions of the writings of Muscogee (Creek) poet and nature writer Alexander Posey, which were published by the University of Nebraska Press. He is founder and coeditor of the award-winning scholarly journal Literature in the Early American Republic and is currently working on a monograph about the origins of American environmental prose. His edition of Paul L. Errington's nature writing classic, Of Men and Marshes, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

Horses, Warfare, and Becoming-Human
Jeremy Withers is a lecturer in the English Department at Iowa State. His research focuses on the intersections between warfare and nature as represented in medieval texts, as well as on environmental readings of contemporary American literature and film.