Christian Knoeller

Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1993

English Education

Research Areas:
Environmental history and ecocriticism as well as Midwestern, environmental, and Native American literature.

Professor Knoeller serves on the faculty of the secondary English Education Program. He has published book chapters and articles widely on both critical and pedagogical topics, including internationally in Canada and Australia. In recent years, his scholarship on environmental history as well as Midwestern and Native American literature has appeared in leading ecocritical journals, such as articles on Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from the Association for Literature and Environment (published by Oxford University Press), and on John James Audubon in Journal of Ecocriticism in Canada. His pedagogical publications have also appeared internationally including articles on teaching Native American literature in both English in Australia and the English Quarterly from the Canadian Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. Current scholarly work focuses on environmental and Native American literature, including his most recent book, Reading Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change, from the University of Nevada Press (2017). His first collection of poems, Completing the Circle, was awarded the Millennium Prize from Buttonwood Press. He has received both the Midwestern Heritage Prize for Literary Criticism (2007) and the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Poetry (2011) from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML). Work in progress includes the book manuscript Journeys in Search of Environmental History. Professor Knoeller is Past President of Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and has been named the 2019 recipient of the Society's​ MidAmerica Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literary scholarship.