{Home > People > Faculty > Senate Faculty > Michael Ziser}---------------

Michael Ziser Assistant Professor of English

Ph.D. Harvard University, 2003
B.A. UC Berkeley, 1996

His scholarly fields are American literature before the Civil War; American nature writing through the present day; ecocritical theory; and Anglophone settlement literature (Canada, Australia, South Africa). More particular interests include ornithological writing, Transcendentalism, phenomenology, bioregionalism, and cognitive literary studies.

At UC Davis he has conducted a seminar on Transcendentalism and taught survey courses on American Literature Before 1800 and The American Novel Before 1900. Classes in 2004-2005 to include Introduction to Nature and Culture, the Nineteenth Century Novel, and a graduate seminar (subject TBA).

Recent publications include Dictionary of Literary Biography entries on early American naturalists Thomas Nuttall, Constantine Rafinesque, and Alexander Wilson (forthcoming 2005); a reconsideration of Walden's mode (Nineteenth Century Prose, forthcoming Fall 2004); and an inquiry into very early American writing about tobacco (William and Mary Quarterly, forthcoming Winter 2005). Current work includes an anthology of American writing about birds, an essay on the possible greening of evangelical Christianity, research into the literary uses of native American food crops along the 17th and 18th century Atlantic seaboard, and revision of a monograph on the reciprocal influence of American environmental and literary history before the Civil War.