Faculty Current Projects

Allison Carruth
My interests include environmental criticism, twentieth-century literature, globalization theory, and food studies. I also have an abiding interest in experimental drama and poets' theater. My current book project is entitled "Global Appetites: Literary Form and Food Politics from World War I to the World Trade Organization." The project argues that the global politics of food technology and trade have shaped profoundly the production of literature in English since 1918.
Suzanne Clark
I'm working on several projects related to the "Natural History of Modernism," about the interaction of modernist literature and the natural sciences. In particular I'm working on Mary Austin and Sitkala-Za (the close observation of nature as a scientific opposition in modernist religious debates). Publications include Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the West, Southern Illinois University Press, 2000; Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word, Indiana University Press,1991; articles on rhetoric, social construction, feminism, pedagogy, Millay, Boyle, Hart Crane, Hemingway, and LeGuin.
Jim Crosswhite
All of my published work has been on rhetorical theory, on the relation of philosophy and rhetoric, and on argumentation. However, for about ten years, I have also developed and taught courses and given conference presentations in the general area of literature and the environment. I have explored the philosophical and rhetorical dimensions of nature writing in these courses, and lately I have focused especially on the idea of wilderness and the wild. Last year (2000), I received a Summer Research Award to investigate what has happened to the idea of wilderness in the course of the globalization of the American wilderness ideal. Publications include The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Winner of the Modern Language Association's 1997 Mina P. Shaughnessy Award. "Nature and Reason: Inertia and Argumentation"; "Rhetoric and Cultural Studies: Arguments and Argument-analogues"; "Mood in Argumentation: Heidegger and the Exordium"; "Is There an Audience for this Argument: Fallacies, Theories and Relativisms"; and "Being Unreasonable: Perelman and the Problem of Fallacies."
John Gage
I work in rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and twentieth-century American poetry. I'm interested in ethical questions raised by environmental debate, literary depictions of the relationship between human and non-human nature, and uses of figurative language to depict the natural world. Publications include The Shape of Reason; In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism; "An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives;" "The Implications of Exceptionalism for an Ethics of Rhetoric;" "Prescriptive Rhetorics, the Rejection of Rhetoric, and the Ethical Response of Rhetorical Theories," and "Rhetoric and Dialectic in Robert Frost's 'A Masque of Reason'."
Theresa May
Professor, Theatre Arts Department (click on name to be directed to Professor May's profile)
William Rossi

My research interests are focused in two main projects: a study of mid-19th century Anglo-American evolutionary discourse, approached through Henry Thoreau's dual career as environmental writer and naturalist; and a longer term (i.e., ill-defined and meandering) exploration of US writing of place and displacement, mid-19th century to the present. Relevant publications include edited volumes of Thoreau’s writings-- Journal 3: 1848-1851 (Princeton, 1990); Journal 6: 1853 (Princeton, 2000); "Wild Apples" and Other Natural History Essays (Georgia, 2002); the Norton Critical Edition Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and Other Writings (2008)--and the following essays: “Poetry and Progress: Thoreau, Lyell, and the Geological Principles of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ,” American Literature 66 (June1994), 275-300; “Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Historical Guide , ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 101‑150;  “Following Thoreau’s Instincts,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 31.2 (Fall 2004), 75-92; and “Transcendentalism and Evolutionary Theory” in The Oxford Handbook to Transcendentalism , ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009).  

Gordon Sayre
I am a specialist in colonial American Literature, and I also teach Native American Lit. and 19th century American Lit. My interests in Eco-Criticism center around anthropology and Natural History, but I also worked with a Ph.D. student on his dissertation about mountaineering literature. I'm especially interested in how conceptions of American prehistory and paleo-Indian peoples inform modern notions of landscape, ecology, sovereignty, natural history, and anthropology. Some of my publications include:"The Mammoth: Endangered Species or Vanishing Race?" JEMCS: Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 63-87. "Le Page du Pratz's Fabulous Journey of Discovery: Learning about Nature Writing from a Colonial Promotional Narrative." In The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Essays On Literature, Theory, and the Environment University of Iowa Press (2002). "If Thomas Jefferson had visited Niagara Falls: The Sublime Wilderness Spectacle in America, 1775-1825." ISLE 8:2 (Summer 2001), reprinted in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism 1993-2003, Ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic. University of Georgia Press, 2003, 102-123. "Urban Climbers in the Wilderness: Mounts Hood, Rainier, and Shasta, and the History of Popular Mountaineering." In Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West. Ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003: 92-110.  "The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand." Early American Literature 33:3 (Fall 1998), 225-249. "The Beaver as Native and as Colonist." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littérature comparée 22:3-4 (Fall/Winter 1995-96, Special Issue "Postcolonial Literatures: Theory and Practice"), 659-682. Excerpted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 2nd edition, 2005. "Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples." In Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, Medieval to Modern. Ed. Gary Taylor and Philip Beidler. London: Palgrave, 2005: 51-75.
Ted Toadvine

  • I am a member of the Philosophy Department and the Environmental Studies Program. My research focuses on contemporary continental philosophy (especially phenomenology and post-structuralism) and environmental philosophy, including environmental ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and the philosophy of nature more broadly. I have pioneered an approach known as "ecophenomenology," which holds that the methodology of phenomenology is uniquely situated to illuminate contemporary environmental debates. My publications include two edited collections, both from SUNY Press: Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (2003) and Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice (2007). My latest book, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in 2009. I am also managing editor of the biennial journal Environmental Philosophy, and Secretary for the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. More information on my research and teaching can be found on my webpage: www.uoregon.edu/~toadvine/

    • Louise Westling
    Present research explores philosophical grounding for ecocriticism and its intersections with modern science. Philosophers whose work seems most useful right now are Dewey, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. More recent thinkers who are relevant include Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, and Bruno Latour. An early foray in this area is my article "Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World," New Literary History 30.4 (Fall 99). I was one of the founding members of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and I served as President in 1998. My research has been focused on ecocriticism for the past decade and a half. Growing out of my 1985 book Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Conner, my interest in landscape imagery broadened into The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction (1996). I've also edited two African-American autobiographies, He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice and Witness to Injustice by David Frost, Jr. Recent articles: "Green Humanism: A New Vision for a New Century," "Southern Literature in the Flesh: Ecocriticism and Literary Tradition," "Monstrous Technologies in Silko, Ortiz, Castillo, and Solnit," "Thomas Sutpen's Marriage to the Dark Body of the Land." Teaching areas are modern fiction, ecocriticism, environmental studies, and world literature.

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    Updated 10/17/08