Christoph Irmscher of Indiana U. to Speak about American Literature and Sustainability on 10/28

On Thursday, October 28, 2010, Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, will visit WMU to participate in the English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series.
Dr. Irmscher will give the lecture “Straw Leaves, Table Bugs, and Birch-Bark Poems: Sustainability in American Literary Culture” at 7 pm in Brown Hall 3025. In this lecture, he will discuss an art exhibit on literature and sustainability that he curated this fall at IU’s Lilly Library.
Prof. Irmscher teaches and writes about nineteenth-century American and Canadian literature and culture, and has a particular interest in ecocriticism. His published books The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (Rutgers UP, 1999), an edition of the writings of John James Audubon (Library of America, 1999), Longfellow Redux (UP of Illinois, 2008), and the anthology A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Temple UP, 2009), co-edited with Alan Braddock. He recently completed a book about the nineteenth-century anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, which also seeks to understand the beginnings of graduate instruction in this country.
This speaker has worked extensively with public institutions, the National Park Service, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Maine Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where he guest-curated the recent Bicentennial Longfellow exhibit.
Dr. Irmscher’s visit is being co-sponsored by WMU’s Environmental Studies Program.
Please contact Professor Anthony Ellis of the English Department for further information at (269) 387-2606 or anthony.ellis@wmich.edu.