Profile for Kelly Sultzbach

Brief biography

I grew up in the American Midwest, Ohio to be exact, with memories of summers camping in parks near Lake Erie.  But my intellectual “growing up” was influenced by the cultures of the East Coast and the West Coast, in states as far flung as Connecticut and Oregon.  These academic communities helped me develop a value for the art of meaningful conversation and research--where being “right” or “wrong” isn't necessarily the goal, but rather the intellectual process of engaging in honest (sometimes difficult, but always considering multiple perspectives) analytical inquiry is valued.  I aim to teach students strategies for working through ambiguity and complexity, so that our goals include finding third solutions, asking better questions, and collaborating on creative ways forward.

My own career has taken a meandering path through lots of interests that I bring together in my scholarly research and the classes I teach at UWL.  After graduating with a B.A. in English from Yale University, I went to law school at University of California, Davis, eager to work in their Civil Rights Clinic representing prisoners.  After spending a couple years at a large law firm, I found myself missing the engagement with “big ideas” and began to wonder if the best way for me to help the cause of good in the world was to empower others to question, analyze, interpret, and ponder universal questions too. 

I had always been interested in issues of nature and place and the works of Virginia Woolf helped me think about my environment as animate, living, and speaking to me in a myriad of voices.  As a result, when I went to the University of Oregon, I got my Ph.D. in 20^th Century British and American Literature, with an emphasis in Environmental Literature and Ecocritical theory.  Now, as we become aware that we are living in the era of the Anthropocene and re-considering our relationship with a shifting climate, the tension between economic values and ecological well-being, the intersection between social justice and environmental justice, as well as new scientific verification of the richness of non-human intelligence and culture, the study of what stories we tell about our environment and animal life seems even more significant.  As the Director of Sustainability & Environmental Studies, I seek out interdisciplinary projects and involve students in community engagement activities too.  My first monograph book, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden (Cambridge UP) came out in 2016 and I am currently working on a project reconsidering what 20^th Century British and American Literature has to tell us about how we envision collective action and environmental justice in the face of environmental crises. 

I truly enjoy being able to renew and recreate our cultural touchstones through teaching. I often learn a lot through the questions my students ask too.  If you share any of these interests, please come see me—I would be delighted to chat.