Lawrence Buell

Lawrence Buell (AB, Princeton, PhD, Cornell, both in English), Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature. Professor Buell teaches courses in the history of American literature and culture, and has a particular interest in environmental(ist) discourses, issues of cultural nationalism, and comparatist approaches to American literary study including transatlantic and postcolonial models of inquiry. The 19th century, particularly the antebellum era, is his period of greatest expertise. He is the author of Literary Transcendentalism (1973), New England Literary Culture (1986), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001), Emerson (2003), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). He is co-editor, with Wai Chee Dimock, of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature(2007).

Writing for an Endangered World won the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations' Cawelti Prize for the best book of 2001 in the field of American Cultural Studies; Emerson won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism. Professor Buell won the 2007 Jay Hubbell Award, Modern Language Association, American Literature Group, for lifetime contributions to American literary studies.

Contact information: Department of English