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 in language. A related activity is herding sheep with Australian Kelpies, a good way to learn and develop cross-species communication. Recent conference presentations have been
- "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.
- "Stranded on the Ark: Yann Martel's Life of Pi."
- "Merleau-Ponty's Human-Animality Intertwining""
Publications
Books:
- Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor
- Eudora Welty
- The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction.
- Editor, He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice
- Editor, 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).
