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Christoph Irmscher
Christoph Irmscher (Email; phone 812-855-2037)
Professor
Ph.D. habil., University of Bonn, 1997
Ph.D., University of Bonn, 1991
M.A., University of Bonn, 1988
I teach and write about
nineteenth-century American and Canadian literature and culture. A long-standing interest of mine is ecocriticism, specifically early American nature writing—hence my book on The Poetics of Natural History, my edition of the writings of John James Audubon, and the forthcoming ecocritical anthology, A Keener Perception, which I co-edited with the art historian Alan Braddock (Temple University). Another abiding passion of mine is nineteenth-century American poetry. In Longfellow Redux (due out in paperback this year), I have tried to understand a period in which poetry was meant to be read by a broad, transnational audience.
My favorite place at IU is the Lilly Library; studying manuscripts and rare books is essential to my research and teaching. In recent years, I have worked extensively with public institutions, the National Park Service, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Maine Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where I guest-curated last year’s Bicentennial Longfellow exhibit (the companion book for the exhibit is Public Poet, Private Man, published by Houghton). I was a consultant on the recent PBS documentary John James Audubon, for which I was also interviewed. In 2006, I co-taught an NEH Institute for Teachers on Hawthorne and Longfellow at Bowdoin College in Maine.
For the last four years, I have been working on a book about the nineteenth-century anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, which also seeks to understand the beginnings of graduate instruction in this country (under contract with the University of Virginia Press). I am also collaborating with Eva Marie Kroeller of the University of British Columbia on a book about an Ontario-based, influential family of scientists and writers, the McIlwraiths. Future projects will likely include a short history of nineteenth-century American poetry and a new Audubon edition, in collaboration with the Field Museum.
RECENT COURSES
ENG-L202 Literary Interpretation
ENG-L351 American Literature 1800-01865
ENG-L356 American Poetry to 1900
ENG-L653 American Literature 1800-1900
ENG-L761 American Poetry
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
Books:
A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, with Alan Braddock (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming)
Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). Click here for more information. http://www.umass.edu/umpress/spr_09/irmscher.htm
Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2006).
Please click here for a radio interview with Christoph Irmscher on the NPR show "The Book Guys."
Please click here for book review from The New England Quarterly.
Please click here for book review from The Times Literary Supplement.
Click here to read article from the Longfellow House Bulletin.
Click here for more information regarding this book.
The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (Rutgers UP, 1999).
Please click here for more information regarding this book.
John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings (Library of America, 1999).
Please click here for more information regarding this book.
Click here for an interview with Christoph Imrscher and filmmaker Larry Hott.
Masken der Moderne: Literarische Selbststilisierung bei T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,Wallace Stevens und William Carlos Williams (Königshausen and Neumann, 1992).
Articles:
“Reading for Our Delight,” forthcoming in Dante Studies 2009.
“The World’s First Scientist: Henry James Clark,”Raritan, forthcoming in 2008.
“Writing by Victorian Naturalists,” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral A. Howells and Eva-Marie Kroeller. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008.
“November 27, 1820: ‘Finished my drawing of the White headed Eagle’ (John James Audubon),” The New Harvard History of American Literature. Rd. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.
“Wonderful Entanglements: Louis Agassiz, Auguste Sonrel, and the Cyanea Arctica,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History. Ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming in 2008.
Foreword, Lucy DeLatte, Lucy Audubon: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008.
“‘So That Nothing May Be Lost’: Thomas McIlwraith’s Birds of Ontario,” in Fiamengo, Janice (ed.), Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007) 144-169.
"When Harry Met Annie," Raritan 26.4 (Spring 2007): 155-79.
“Popular Poetry.” American History through Literature, 1870-1890, ed. Gary Scharnhorst and Tom Quirk (Scribner’s, 2006), 859-867
“The Fireside Poets,” American History through Literature, 1850-1870, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and Janet Gabler-Hover (Scribner’s, 2006), 420-425.
“‘Pearly Light’: Genoa in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination.” La città e il mare, ed. Giorgetta Revelli (Edizioni ETS, 2005), 285-302
“Nature-Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. Eva-Marie Kroeller ( Cambridge UP, 2004) 94-114
“Darwin’s Beard.” Aging and Old Age in British and American Literature, ed. Christa Jansohn ( LIT, 2004), 87-106
“Longfellow Redux,” Raritan 21.3 (Winter 2002): 100-129
“Nature Laughs at Our Systems: Philip Henry Gosse’s The Canadian Naturalist,” Canadian Literature 170/171 (Autumn/Winter 2001): 58-86
“Audubon and the Veiled Lady,” The American Scholar 68.3 (Summer 1999): 65-76
Work in progress:
Louis Agassiz: A Cultural Biography (under contract with U of Virginia P).
The McIlwraith Family, with Eva-Marie Kroeller (University of British Columbia).
SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS
Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS) Award for best electronic exhibition, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2007 (for Longfellow Redux)
Friends of the Longfellow House, 2006
NEH Faculty Fellowship, 2005-2006
Rodney G. Dennis Fellow in the Study of Manuscripts, 2004
Research Fellowship, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2003
NEH Summer Stipend, 2002
American Studies Network Prize 2000
CUE Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Harvard University, 2000
Literature and Language Award of the Association of American Publishers, 1999 |
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