Alf Siewers
113 Vaughan Literature
(570) 577-3575
alf.siewers@bucknell.edu
Alfred K. Siewers teaches and researches environmental approaches to literature, premodern/medieval and Celtic literature, fantasy literature, and traditions of nature in English poetics and epic from Chaucer to Coleridge and Cooper.
He is Nature and Human Communities Initiative faculty coordinator at the Bucknell Environmental Center, and senior fellow at the Environmental Residential College. A former staff writer with the Chicago Sun-Times and The Christian Science Monitor, he also helps to supervise/advise media internships for English majors.
Teaching Interests
Environmental Humanities, Traditions and Theory of Nature Writing, Medieval Literature, Celtic Literature, Susquehanna Valley Studies
Current Projects and Research Interests
My work focuses on the intersection of poetics, landscape and ecological restoration. It draws on environmental phenomenology, deep ecology, ecosemiotics, embodied mind sciences, and especially premodern traditions of nature including Eriugena, Dionysius, desert asceticism, Welsh and Native American stories and practices--along with English poetic and epic literary traditions of nature. Current projects include an edited collection Reimagining Nature, a book The Green World of English Literature, and a study of the intersection of early American ecopoetics and native traditions in the Susquehanna Valley.
Selected Publications
"Pre-Modern Ecosemiotics: The Green World as Literary Ecology," in The Space of Culture-The Place of Nature (University of Tartu Press 2011)
"Ecopoetics and the Origins of English Literature," in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge 2011)
"Spenser's Green World," Early English Studies (2010)
"Ecocriticism" in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory 2d. ed. (Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
Review of Ents, Elves and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (2010)
Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, co-editor with Jane Chance (2005; paperback edition 2009)
Review of Batu-Angas: Envisioning Nature with Alfred Russel Wallace in Temenos Academy Review (2009)
"Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building," in The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press 2007)
"The Greyest-Greenest-Bluest Eye: Colours of Martyrdom and Colours of the Winds as Iconographic Landscapes," Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 50 (2005): 31-66
Recent Awards
Bucknell's Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence, 2007; Maxwell Award for Administrative Excellence, co-winner, 2008. Two students of mine won Maxwell Prizes for their work in environmental humanities, 2007 and 2009.
