PAUL OUTKA, Ph.D., University of Virginia (2000), specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, American poetry, and African American literature. His theoretical interests include critical race theory, trauma studies, aesthetic theory, the posthuman, and ecocriticism. Professor Outka has published in Contemporary Literature, The Mickle Street Review, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, The Journal of American Studies and elsewhere. In 2004-05 he was awarded a full-year American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellowship to work on his book project examining the intersection between the construction of racial identity and natural experience in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Race and Nature from Trancendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance was published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their series "Signs of Race." In 2009 the book won the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment's (ASLE) biennial prize for the best book of ecocriticism published in 2007-2008.

PUBLICATIONS

• Evolution, Essentialism, and the Organic Sublime: the Nineteenth-Century Posthuman. Book manuscript, current project.
• Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• "(De)composing Whitman." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 12.1 (2005) 41-60.
• "Whitman and Race ('he's queer, he's unclear, get used to it')." Journal of American Studies, 36 (2002) 293-318.
• "Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 114, Gale Group, 2002.
• "Whitmanian Cybernetics." The Mickle Street Review, Summer 2001, No. 14.
• "Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." Contemporary Literature, 38 (1997) 447-82.
• Entries and bibliographies for "Gender Studies," "Masculinist," "Misogyny," "Negritude," and "Womens Studies." Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, eds. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

AWARDS

• 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) biennial prize for best book of ecocriticism published in 2007 and 2008.
• University of Maine Trustee Professor, 2007.
• American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Junior Faculty, 2004-05.
• University Honors Faculty. University of Maine at Farmington, 2003-07.
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. University of Virginia, 1999-2000.