Profile for Kelly Sultzbach
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Kelly Sultzbach
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Professor
English
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Kelly Sultzbach Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Professor
English
Specialty area(s)
20th Century British & American Literature, Environmental Literature, Environmental Justice, Ecocriticism, Animal Studies, Climate Literature, Questions of Place and Identity, Law and Literature
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 the art of meaningful conversation and research, even when people disagree. Sometimes being “right” or “wrong” isn't necessarily the goal. Instead, the intellectual process of engaging in research-based inquiry, multiple perspectives, and ethical questions can create a journey of shared discovery. 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, before getting a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Oregon. Throughout my professional trajectory, I have always been interested in issues related to the environment, justice, and community engagement.
Whether I'm teaching detective stories, Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novels, indigenous poetry about the kinship we feel with water, or how legal language works, 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.
Current courses at UWL
Spring 2026
First Year Seminar: How to be Sherlock: Unlocking the power of reading and observation to see clues others miss. We will practice skills of close reading literature, observing the natural world, and playing some Sherlock-based detective games to explore the way different modes of perception can yield clues to hidden meaning.
ENG 200: Literature & the Human Experience: Place, Identity, and Human Nature
ENG 302: Law & Literature: Social Justice & Environmental Justice
Education
University of Oregon, Ph.D.
UC Davis, J.D.
Yale University, B.A.
Career
Teaching history
ENG 110: College Writing I
ENG 112: College Composition, Advanced Placement
ENG 200: Literature & the Human Experience: Modern Literature & the Animal Mind
ENG 200: Literature & the Human Experience: Place, Identity, and Human Nature
ENG 200: Animal Literature
ENG 204: British Literature II: The Country, the City, and Human Nature
ENG 302: Law & Literature (This course also counts towards the Legal Studies minor)
ENG 311: Critical Theory: The Power of Making Meaning
ENG 368: British Lit. After 1900: Green Thoughts in a Grey World: Questions of Environment, Trauma, and the Formation of New Identities in 20th & 21st C. British Literature & Culture
ENG 372: American Literature After 1900: American Texts in Dialogue & Debate: Creating the American Story
ENG/ENVS /SJ 387: Environmental Literature (This course also counts towards the Environmental Studies minor and the Social Justice minor)
Professional history
Fulbright Scholar with University of Liverpool, January-July 2019
Invited speaker at: University of Stavanger, Norway; University of St. Andrews, Scotland; University of Galway, Ireland
Research and publishing
BOOKS:
Cambridge Companion to Literature & Climate. Adeline Johns-Putra and Kelly Sultzbach, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
RECENT ARTICLES:
"Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Between the Acts." Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene, ed. Peter Adkins, Edinburgh UP, 2024.
“Individual and Collective Action: Climate Action as Narrative.” One of two essays comprising a dialogic chapter. Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate. Adeline Johns-Putra and Kelly Sultzbach, eds. London: Cambridge UP, 2022.
“Retreating to the Country: R.C. Sherriff’s Rural Interwar Novels and Environmental Politics.” Modernist Cultures. Special Issue: “Modernism and the Environment,” Jeremy Diaper, ed. February, 2021.
“How Can Scholarly Work Be Meaningful in an Era of Lost Causes?” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. Special Issue: “Environmental Humanities.” Graham Huggan, ed. Invited article, published online: February 13, 2019. DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2019.1578249, and hardcopy Vol. 23, Nos.1-2, May 2019, pp. 19-38.
“Embodied Modernisms: Ecophenomenology and Trans-Atlantic Modernist Literature.” Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, Bloomsbury Academic Press Series, Ariane Mildenberg, Volume Editor. December 2018.
STUDENT-LED COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS:
Minnesota Marine Art Museum
Planned student-led gallery tour for Fall 2025 on the topic “Is Water Alive?” based on Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? (2025) and other texts related to water and the Rights of Nature. Small groups of students led groups to three different paintings, paired those with literary readings, and designed discussion questions.
Planned student-led gallery tour for Fall 2023 on relationship of art and literature in American cultural representations of nature in the 19th century and today, examining what cultural representations of nature encourage us to see and what they frequently obfuscate in both painting and literature, 2023.
Pearl Street Books and The Nature Place
Student-led literary conversations related to multiple themes: AI and Science Fiction, Building Collective Hope, and Environmental Imagination, Spring 2025
Mississippi Valley Conservancy
Communications Board Member and author of annual newsletter articles related to literature and environmental conservation, Spring 2018 – present
Class Projects:
“Wild Reads” Environmental Literature book reviews for website, 2019-2021
“Coffee & Conservation” student-led discussions of climate fiction, 2019-2021
“Nature Writing Workshops”, 2021
