KU News Release

Retired English professor co-directs Beijing’s first ecocriticism conference

LAWRENCE — For the second time in two years, Elizabeth A. Schultz, professor emerita of English at the University of Kansas, is headed to China as a scholar and teacher.

This time she will co-direct Beijing’s first international conference on ecocriticism that opens Oct. 9 at Tsinghua University. She is also leading the largest U.S. delegation of scholars — eight KU faculty and staff including herself — to the three-day conference sponsored by Tsinghua University and the U.S. Fulbright Commission.

Titled “Beyond Thoreau: American and International Responses to Nature,” the conference is attracting about 80 scholars from more than eight countries. More than half the scholars are from China; others are coming from Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Turkey and the United States. The conference will be conducted in English.

Wang Ning, a professor of foreign languages at Tsinghua University, proposed the conference and is co-directing the event with Schultz. The two scholars met in 2007 while Schultz was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University. That year, Schultz, who retired from 34 years of teaching in 2001, conducted the first ecocriticism course ever offered in Beijing.

Ning worked with the Chinese Ministry of Education, and Schultz met with Fulbright officials in Beijing and Washington, D.C., to seek sponsorship for an international conference.

Schultz, internationally known as a Herman Melville scholar, is the first to admit that “ecocriticism” is hardly a household word in China or the United States. She describes the field as an intersection between culture and environment — a study of the relationship between ecology and literature that has expanded into all other fields of study.

At KU, Schultz first taught ecocriticism courses two years before her retirement. She found students were looking at literature through an environmental perspective, and they were carrying their ideas beyond the classroom.

“It was truly an amazing experience for me as a teacher — and as a student. The subject is contagious intellectually and imaginative,” Schultz said.

Certainly seven KU faculty and staff members agree. Four faculty members from the School of Fine Arts making presentations at the conference are: Muriel Cohan, associate professor; Pok Chi Lau, professor; Joan Stone, lecturer emerita; and Patrick Suzeau, professor. Three other conference presenters are from KU’s Spencer Museum of Art: Saralyn Hardy, director; and Kris Ercums, curator of Asian art. David Cateforis, associate professor of art history, is also participating.

Hardy is speaking on the museum as a living organism; Ercums will discuss a Chinese artist whose work concerns the contemporary Chinese landscape art; and Cateforis is presenting a paper on the environmental work of Alexis Rockman, an American artist.

Lau will speak on his recent photographic work. Suzeau and Cohan will perform a dance titled “Sacred Geography” that includes images of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Stone will perform a dance inspired by the loss of trees near her Lawrence home and reading of Thoreau. The dance includes fabric sculptures by Wendy Weiss, a KU alumna, and an original score by Jay Kreimer, both of Lincoln, Neb.

Schultz’s presentation will examine Homer’s “Odyssey” as an ecocritical text — a first. In talking with Stanley Lombardo, KU classics professor whose translations of Homer’s epics have won national acclaim, Schultz found no previous ecocritical reviews of “The Odyssey.”

Following the conference, Schultz will teach a short seminar at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She will remain in China until Oct. 23.

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