Louise Westling, Ph.D. (Professor)
Statement
I teach in both the English Department and the Environmental Studies Program. My current research focuses on ecophenomenology and literature, animality, and embodiment and language. A related activity is herding sheep with Australian Kelpies, and here I am a rank amateur fascinated by three-way cross-species communication. My most recent conference presentation was "The Human/Animality Dance of Sheep Herding," which draws upon Vicki Hearne's and Donna Haraway's work but extends their considerations with the phenomenological attention to language of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Publications
Books:
Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor; Eudora Welty; and The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction. Editor, He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice and Witness to Injustice by David Frost, Jr.
Recent articles: "Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World" (New Literary History 1999); "Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf" (Anglia 2006); "Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman" (Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies 2006); "Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Ecopoetics and the Problem of Humanism" (Culture, Creativity and Environment 2007).
