Bleasby Colloquium to Discuss American Environmental Literature

Dr. Matthew Sivils, Westminster College assistant professor of English, will deliver the second in the ongoing series of Bleasby Colloquia Thursday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m. in the Sebastian Mueller Theater located in the McKelvey Campus Center.

"In my presentation, Panther Attacks, Ecotones, and American Gothic Environmentalism,' I argue that the panthers found in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Prescott Spofford take the guise of Gothic monsters, of demons that must be exorcised from the wilderness so that Americans may themselves possess the land," Sivils said. "Ultimately these texts reveal, through their depiction of panther attacks in what ecologists now call ecotones, the first stirrings of an American environmental ethic."

This colloquium is part of a series of events scheduled for the George Bleasby Colloquia, a series of literary events in honor of the late Dr. Bleasby, who chaired the Department of English at Westminster from 1954-75.

Sivils earned his undergraduate degree in fisheries and wildlife biology from Arkansas Tech University and his master's and Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University. A scholar of early and nineteenth-century American literature, Sivils has published articles on such authors as William Bartram, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Willa Cather. He has also published a critical edition of Alexander Posey's prose titled Chinnubbie and the Owl: Stories, Orations, and Oral Traditions (University of Nebraska Press).

Contact Sivils at (724) 946-7350 or e-mail sivilsmw@westminster.edu for more information.

Dr. Matthew Sivils