Michael P. Branch
Personal History/Education
Born in 1963, Mike Branch is a Virginian whose childhood in Northern Virginia was punctuated by moves to Manila and Mexico City. His early years were given primarily to hiking, fishing, and springboard diving (in which he competed through college). In 1981 he went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he dove, played competitive ultimate frisbee, hosted a radio show (“Biography of the Blues”), was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa (it can now be told that after being locked out of his dorm room he gave the PBK address while wearing swimming trunks beneath his gown) and into an arcane secret society (the F.H.C. Society, of which Thomas Jefferson was also a member), worked summers as a consultant on international terrorism for the U.S. Department of State’s Threat Analysis Group, and double majored in English (honors thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson) and social psychology (research on gender differences in text processing).
In 1985 he graduated summa cum laude from William and Mary and spent his first summer backpacking and snow climbing in the West before becoming a graduate student in English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in the autumn of that year. Over the next seven years he lived in various rural Appalachian communities near Charlottesville, devoting himself to literary studies and to gardening, hiking, zymurgy, splitting firewood, mucking out horse stalls, skinny dipping, perfecting a southern accent (since repressed), and traveling around the country to ultimate tournaments. He completed his M.A. magna cum laude in 1987 (emphasis upon nineteenth-century American literature and natural science) and his Ph.D. magna cum laude in 1993 (dissertation entitled “The Enlightened Naturalist: Ecological Romanticism in American Literature”).
Already a Tennessee Squire (honorary, since he is a Virginian) and an ordained minister (actual ministerial title: “Universal Philosopher of Absolute Reality”) who has performed a half dozen wedding ceremonies for students and faculty in the Literature and Environment (“L&E”) program, Mike now aspires to becoming a Great Basin/ Eastern Sierra Slope version of the gentleman farmer. He lives with his wife Eryn and daughters Hannah Virginia and Caroline Emerson—and lots of snakes, scorpions, packrats, and golden eagles—at “Piedmont,” a passive solar, wood-heated home he and his family designed and built in 2003-04 at 5,880 feet in the Juniper-dotted desert hills north of Reno. Here he tries, with small success, to make things grow in the scorching and freezing winds. During the few moments when more urgent work isn’t pressing, he enjoys activist and stewardship work, hiking, gardening, building walls, digging holes, cutting stovewood, playing guitar and blues harp, having strong opinions about San Francisco Giants baseball, and sipping bourbon (an act of patriotism, as bourbon is America’s only native spirit).
Research and Teaching Interests
In 1993 Mike accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Florida International University in Miami, where he taught courses in colonial and romantic American literature, composition, environmental ethics, comparative environmental philosophy (often team teaching with biologists, historians, and theologians), and literature and environment (complete with hiking, paddling, and wading trips into the sloughs and strands of the Everglades). In 1995 he came to the University of Nevada, Reno, where he helped establish the Graduate Program in Literature and Environment, and where he is now Professor of Literature and Environment. Mike recently finished an appointment as Fitzgerald Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in colonial and nineteenth-century American literature, American romanticism, literature and environment, literature and film, early American nature writing, American novel, and Core Humanities.
Mike’s published books are: The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), co-edited with Daniel J. Philippon; Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (University of Idaho Press, 1998), co-edited with Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic; John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and West to Africa (Island Press, 2001), a textual edition of Muir’s late, unpublished travel journals and correspondence that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003 (University of Georgia Press, 2003) , a collection of critical essays tracking the emergence of ecocriticism through work published in the journal ISLE , co-edited with Scott Slovic; and, Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden, an anthology of American nature writing from the mid-fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth century (University of Georgia Press, 2004). Current book projects include Best Read Naturalist: The Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a collection of Emerson’s nature and natural history pieces, and Camp Life in a Massachusetts Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Corporal George L. F. Branch .
Mike is the author of more than 100 articles, chapters, reviews, and bibliographies—and has given more than 150 keynote addresses, invited lectures, conference papers, and readings—on nature writing and environmental literature. He has also published place-based nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in journals and magazines including Utne Reader, Orion Afield, Isotope, Ecotone, Whole Terrain, Red Rock Review, Watershed, CrossRoads, and Terminus. His scholarly interests include sense of place, regionalism and bioregionalism, urban simulacra of nature, ecocritical textual editing, nature writing in the American romantic tradition, southern nature writing, early American natural history writing, the institutionalization of ecocriticism, environmental reform in the nineteenth century, activism and environmental writing, and ecocritical environmental philosophy. His published work includes studies of authors including William Wood, Cotton Mather, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, John Kirk Townsend, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Susan Cooper, John Muir, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Rick Bass.
Mike is a founding officer and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and has served as Book Review Editor of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for more than a decade. He is also a founding co-editor of Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism, a book series published by the University of Virginia Press (20 titles to date). He has been a Borish Scholar, Commonwealth Fellow, Governor’s Fellow, and Davidge Fellow, and has received research grants or awards from the Knapp Foundation, Virginia Graduate Faculty, FIU Foundation, Johns Hopkins University Press, Raven Society, and University of Nevada Reno College of Arts and Sciences. He has received teaching awards from the Golden Key National Honor Society, the UNR Alumni Society, and the UNR Excellence in Teaching Program, and he was honored in 2001 as the winner of the UNR College of Liberal Arts Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and in 2004 as the recipient of the F. Donald Tibbitts University Distinguished Teacher Award. His work as a mentor to graduate students was recognized in 2006 with UNR’ s Vada Trimble Outstanding Mentor Award.
Contact Information: mbranch@unr.edu
Phone: 775-682-6375