AU professor to discuss authentic relationship to the natural world 10/26/10
Melissa Ryan, associate professor of English at Alfred University, will present "Enjoyment, Enwildment,
Emplacement: In Search of an Authentic Relationship to The Natural World" on Thursday, Nov. 4, during AU's Bergren Forum at 12:10 p.m., in Powell Campus Center's Nevins Theatre. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Ryan will be talking about how writers have sought and sought to represent a sense of place. The Forum will explore what we hope to find in nature as well as some of the anxious questions this deep need produces, including:
Am I sentimentalizing? colonizing? Insufficiently biocentric? Trying too hard, or not hard enough? Capable of letting go, or holding on?Ryan earned a master of arts degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. Her academic interests include 19- and 20-century American literature, American women writers, modernism, Native American literature, the novel, and writer Willa Cather. Ryan's past publications include "At Home in America: John Fante and the Imaginative American Self" in Studies in American Fiction and "The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!" in American Literature. She is also a recipient of the Kruson Award for Excellence in Teaching from Alfred University in 2005 and member of Phi Beta Kappa .The Bergren Forum,
sponsored by the Alfred University Division of Human Studies, meets Thursdays during each academic semester at the University. Participants are encouraged to bring a lunch; coffee and tea will be available.
