Student Profiles: Justin Shanks
My interests proceed from the premise that literature reflects particular
cultural values and interests. By extension, any literary portrayal of
nature is a product of culture. Before anything can be fixed as natural,
it is first necessary to have an ideological conception of nature. Building
upon an academic background in environmental studies, my research endeavors
focus on cultural constructions of nature/wilderness in (anywhere from Early
Modern British to twentieth-century American) literature. In effort to
better understand the human-environment (i.e., more-than-human) relationship,
my thesis research focuses on early encounters with the terra incognita of
the New World and the legacy of such perceptions, representations, and recreations
upon the more contemporary relationship the exists between wilderness and the
American imagination.