Cheryll Glotfelty
Born at the tail-end of the baby boom, Cheryll Glotfelty was shaped by the kids of Ramona Street, a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Palo Alto, California. Her best friend introduced Cheryll to books and to backpacking, two early hobbies that would inform her ultimate career, but not without digressions along the way. As a young adult, after considering a number of different vocations — German translator, meteorologist, postal carrier — Cheryll eventually buckled down to become a biochemist. Pursuit of this goal was interrupted for a 3,000 mile bicycle trip from Albuquerque, New Mexico, north along the Continental Divide to Jasper, Canada, and west to Prince Rupert on the coast. Returning to the University of California, Davis, to complete her studies in biochemistry, Cheryll abruptly switched majors to English, vaguely disconcerted by stastics that most U.C.D. English majors went on to become bank tellers. Following a boyfriend to Gunnison, Colorado, after earning her B.A., Cheryll experimented with a few more vocations—waitress, short-order cook, window installer—before setting her course for good on becoming an English professor. After earning an M.A. at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, Cheryll moved East to upstate New York to pursue a Ph.D. in American Literature at Cornell University. At Cornell, Cheryll became feminized, postmodernized, and always already theorized. Despite the considerable resources of Cornell University, however, there seemed to be no precedent for taking an “environmental” approach to literary studies. Groping for a way to combine her two passions—literature and nature—Cheryll began a dissertation which studied how American women writers represent nature in fiction.
While engaged in this focussed project, Cheryll received a four-year fellowship, which allowed her to procrastinate on the dissertation in order to investigate in more general terms the possible relationships between literary study and environmental engagement. This feverish research culminated in a lengthy bibliography of critical works that manifested an environmental approach to discussions of literature. Curiously enough, the authors of these studies did not seem to know of each other’s work. Apparently, scholars of literature and environment were working in isolation; there was no sense of community. Cheryll decided that there ought to be.
To make a long story short, Cheryll’s bibliography and networking efforts based on those leads helped to create the field of ecocriticism, led to publication of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (co-edited with Harold Fromm), and earned her a return ticket to the West, where she became the world’s first Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. Since then, Cheryll and her colleagues have founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the nation’s first graduate program in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Cheryll’s research continues to be environmentally inflected and attentive to gender. She has published essays on Willa Cather, Rachel Carson, Eudora Welty, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as on topics such as hunting, women’s backpacking guides, and the trope of war in modern environmentalism. Her love of Nevada has motivated publications on authors Idah Meacham Strobridge and Robert Laxalt, as well as presentations on the literary place-bashing of Nevada. She is currently editing an anthology of Nevada literature entitled Ranges of Light.
Besides Reno’s glorious sunshine, the University of Nevada offers splendid colleagues, students, and opportunities for inventing new courses. In her first six years at Nevada, for example, Cheryll developed twenty different courses, including “Women’s Literature and the Land,” “Ecocriticism and Theory,” “A Regional Approach to American Literature,” “Literature of Nevada,” “Major Texts of the Environmental Movement,” “Nature Writing,” “Literature of the Wild,” “and “Representing the Other: Animals in Literature.” In the future she plans to develop courses on “Adventure,” “Ecofiction,” and “International Environmental Literature.”
Cheryll’s hobbies continue to center around reading and outdoor activities such as rock climbing, hiking, pine nut gathering, pine needle basket weaving, and exploring Nevada’s outback with her husband Steve and young daughter Rosa Ramona.
For more information about Cheryll, and the programs with which she is involved, please feel free to email her at: glotfelt@unr.edu.