Thomas Lynch

Associate Professor

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Ph.D. University of Oregon, American literature / folklore, June 1989.
• M.A. University of Oregon, English literature, 1981.
• B.A. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, English literature, 1977.

Professional Areas of Specialty
My primary areas of interest are cross-cultural ecocriticism and place-conscious literary studies, with an emphasis on bioregionalism. The places whose literature my research focuses on are the American Southwest and the Australian deserts, that is, arid lands that have come under the sway of English-speaking settler colonialism. I have also done considerable work as both a scholar and writer of haiku.

Courses regularly taught:

• English 211, Plains Literature
• English 333, American Authors since 1900: Southwestern Writers
• English 333M, Major American Authors: The Nature Writing Tradition
• English 361A, Intro to Early American Literature
• English 361B, Intro to Late American Literature
• English 4/832, Nature in 19th-Century American Literature
• English 4/898, Place-Conscious Literary Studies: Out West/Outback
• English 933, Seminar in Ecocriticism and Nature Writing

Selected publications and/or projects
My current main research project is “Out West / Outback” an ecocritical and postcolonial reading of literature of the American West and the Australian Outback.
I am also co-editing two scholarly anthologies.  One, in conjunction with Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster, is an anthology of bioregional literary criticism.  The second, co-edited with Susan Maher, is a collection of scholarly essays on Loren Eiseley.

Books
Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature, forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press. This book is a bioregionally oriented ecocritical study of multi-cultural literatures of the American Southwest.

El Lobo: Readings on the Mexican Gray Wolf (2005) University of Utah Press. This book is an anthology I edited regarding the Mexican gray wolf and the campaign to restore this once nearly extinct subspecies to portions of its former range in Arizona and New Mexico.

Recent Essays and Book Chapters
“Literature in the Arid Zone.” In The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers, ed.
by CA Cranston and Robert Zeller, Rodopi Press, 2007.

“Toward a Symbiosis of Ecology and Justice: Water and Land Conflicts in Frank Waters, John
Nichols, and Jimmy Santiago Baca.” In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics,
Poetics, and Pedagogy, ed. by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Various essays are also available online at the UNL Digital Commons

Personal Webpage
For more information you can check out my personal website

Place-Conscious Studies and Ecocritical Resources at UNL