Paul Outka
- Associate Professor
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
I started my scholarly career as a poetry critic, writing a dissertation and several articles on Whitman, and teaching a range of courses on American poetry from its origins through the present day. While my scholarship has become less structured by genre, I retain an emphasis on close reading and a profound, if often critical, engagement with poetry and literary modes of representation in all my writing. As my work has developed, I have focused my attention less on particular authors for their own sake, and more on how a range of political, theoretical, and historical problems have been refracted through literary and other forms of cultural representation.
Research —
19thC U.S. literature and culture, literature and science, American poetry, African American literature.Theoretical foci include ecocriticism, critical race theory, trauma studies, aesthetic theory, and the posthuman.
Selected Publications —
BOOK
Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES and BOOK CHAPTERS:
“Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”
Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century: Science, History, Scale. Stephanie
Lemenager, Ken Hiltner, and Teresa Shewry, eds. New York: Routledge. Forthcoming.
“History, the Posthuman, and the End of Trauma: Propranolol and Beyond.”Traumatology.
15.4 (2009) 76–81.
“(De)composing Whitman.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment,
12.1 (2005) 41-60.
“Whitman and Race (‘he’s queer, he’s unclear, get used to it…’).” Journal of American
Studies, 36 (2002) 293-318.
“Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior.”Contemporary Literature, 38 (1997) 447-82.Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 114, Gale-Centage, 2002.Rpt. in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 136, Gale-Cengage, Forthcoming, 2010.
Awards & Honors —
Winner of the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
(ASLE) Biennial Prize for “Best Book of Ecocriticism” published in 2007-08.
University of Maine Trustee Professorship, 2007-08.
American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Junior Faculty, 2004-05.
University Honors Faculty. University of Maine at Farmington, 2003-07.
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. University of Virginia, 1999-2000.
Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. Department of English, University of Virginia, 1994-95.