This will be a two-day conference in honor of the career and contributions of retiring English Department Professor John Knott. The conference will be a dynamic engagement with Knott’s current fields of interest: ecology, ecologically-minded literary criticism (or ‘eco-criticism’), as well as the verbal and visual representation of the natural world. Working in tandem with the Program in Creative Writing, we have lined up a number of readings by important creative writers whose work addresses American nature. The poet David Baker (Midwest Eclogue), non-fiction and fiction writers Joy Williams (Ill Nature, Florida Keys, The Quick and the Dead) and Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented World, and Wild Card Quilt) will be reading from their work. The photographer Emmet Gowin (Changing the Earth) will share his work that records—through large format aerial images—recent changes which industry, large-scale agriculture, and nuclear technology have brought to various American and European landscapes. We will have both a keynote address by a leading figure in eco-criticism (John Elder, Middlebury) as well as two panels of prominent literary scholars, all of whom will address the most recent and most promising directions in this field. Partnering with Robert Grese, head of the Nichols Arboretum and the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, we will take an outing to see the remnant of ancient prairie that exists in Dow Field as well as the work in native species restoration being led in our area by the University of Michigan.

As John Knott prepares to retire from our Department, we will not only be losing a valued colleague, but one of two faculty members whose scholarship and teaching addresses the intersection of American nature and representation. As our nation and world face a host of environmental crises and hence important societal decisions about our treatment of the natural world, it is crucial that relevant branches of the University of Michigan incorporate such thinking into their pedagogical and scholarly endeavors. An English Department is uniquely poised to consider how language frames our thinking—and the history of western, Anglophone thinking—about nature. The goal of this conference is to represent the most compelling recent creative and scholarly work in this area, and hence to educate not only English Department faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, but also members of the wider university community in ways in which we might imagine our place in the world.