James C. McKusick is Professor of English and Dean of the Davidson Honors College at The University of Montana.  He completed his B.A. in English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in English at Yale University.  Dr. McKusick has been at The University of Montana since 2005; he was previously a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  His research and teaching interests include British Romanticism, literary theory, environmental studies, and the history of science.  His books include Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Palgrave, 2000), Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing, co-edited with Bridget Keegan (Prentice-Hall, 2001), and Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (Yale University Press, 1986).  He has also published more than twenty articles and over two dozen reviews in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, English Literary History, European Romantic Review, Keats-Shelley Journal, Modern Philology, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, University of Toronto Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle.

Over the last decade, Dr. McKusick’s scholarship has pioneered the development of a new kind of literary criticism, known as ecocriticism.  This approach to the study of English and American literature seeks to uncover the intellectual roots of the modern environmental movement in the nature writing of earlier historical periods.  In Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology, Dr. McKusick argues that the English Romantic poets created a new, holistic way of perceiving the natural world, an essentially ecological understanding of nature, which profoundly influenced the later history of science and culture.

Dr. McKusick has been the recipient of grants and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fletcher Jones Foundation, and the Maryland Humanities Council.  He currently serves as President of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association and Executive Director of the John Clare Society of North America.