Work as life in process. Growing up in inner-city Chicago, spending summers along Lake Michigan and in the river bluffs of northeast Iowa, I became fascinated with landscape and culture. My current projects involve developing a theoretical framework for ecocriticism through readings of premodern literature. My teaching and work with student researchers focus on this area.

 

View from Skellig Michael off southwestern Ireland, once an early Christian monastic community, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The blending of sky and sea and land along the Irish coast is a distinctive environmental context for the unique early Irish literary concept of glasmartre, literally meaning "blue-grey-green martyrdom": a type of ascetic practice with both bodily and cosmic aspects. Dr. Kevin Murray at UC Cork describes the early Irish color term glas as "the colour of sky in water." Islands and the sea often had otherworldly associations in early Irish texts.

Alfred K. Siewers, Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature, English Department
Bucknell University

Medieval Studies Resources

Environmental Humanities at Bucknell, Celtic Studies, Medieval Caucus, A Valentine for Chicago

Contact me

 

Well of Columba in an old oak grove at Durrow; once a community founded by the sixth-century Irish-Scottish saint (and probable home to the famous Book of Durrow), now a private estate.

Environmental Center News: Expanding courses, research, mark Bucknell Environmental Humanities initiative.
BUEC Environmental Humanities Initiative
Environmental Humanities internships '07

Other news links: The Minneapolis bridge tragedy and literature

Current Courses:

English 340, Medieval Seminar--Haunted Nature: Norse Sagas and Ecocriticism (draft syllabus pdf)

Humanities/English 98--Myth, Reason, and Faith Foundation Seminar.

Coming this spring:

English 243, Elvish Writing: Chaucer, Spenser, and Early English Phenomenology
This course will involve reading selections from two classics of English literature: The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene (the former in Middle English). It will examine their treatment of human interactions with nature, and their shaping of landscape through fantasy, in light of current theoretical concerns in phenomenology.
English 240, The Green World of English Literature. Contextualizing premodern English literature in the multicultural and postcolonial mix of the archipelago of Britain after the end of the Roman province (but including also texts in translation from Mediterranean, Islamic, and Chinese realms), the course will use as a focus the emergence from older motifs of "Green World" comedy by the time of the flowering of Middle English literature.

 

Student/my conference talks (sample podcasts)
2007 International Congress on Medieval Studies, 42nd annual
--"Ecofeminism and Echoes of Celtic Goddesses in Arthurian Romance" (mp3), Molly Clay, MA '08
--"Married to the Land: The Bodies of the Sovereignty Goddess, Land, and Law in the Early Irish Myth The Wooing of Etain,” A. Joseph McMullen '09
--"Eriugena, Iconographic Intertexuality, and the Otherworld,"(mp3) / Talk handout (pdf) , A.K. Siewers,

2007 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment U.S. Biennial Conference
--"Early Medieval Ecology:  An Ecocritical View of Erugena’s Periphyseon,"(mp3) Mike Gibney '08

Publications

"Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building," reprinted in The Postmodern Beowulf , ed. Joy and Ramsey, 2006. On landscape and empire. (Originally in Viator 34 (2003):1-39.)

Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, New Middle Ages series, 2005, which I edited with Jane Chance; also includes my "Tolkien's Cosmic-Christian Ecology" article on fantasy and landscape.

"Writing an Icon of the Land: The Mabinogi as a Mystagogy of Landscape." Peritia 19 (2005): 193-228 (Irish Medieval Academy). Iconography and layered textual landscape.

"The bluest-greyest-greenest eye: colours of martyrdom and colours of the winds as iconographic landscape." Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 50 (2005): 31-66. Landscape as a praxis of aescetic-aesthetics.

"Gildas and Glastonbury," in Via Crucis, Essays on Sources and Ideas in Memory of J.E. Cross, ed. Hall (2002). Landscape as mythic history.

C.V. at a glance
Assistant Prof. Bucknell, 2002-present
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Ph.D. 2001
University of Wales at Aberystwyth, A.M. 1995
Northwestern University, M.S.J. 1982
Brown University, B.A. 1981
Staff Writer, Sun-Times, 1989-1993; Christian Science Monitor, 1988
Teaching and journalism awards include
Bucknell's Presidential Award for Teachng Excellence, 2007