Deanna K. Kreisel

Deanna is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Mississippi, where she has taught for the past 6 years. She was born in Allentown and grew up in suburban Philadelphia, in a house with a lot of lawn. Before moving to Mississippi, she lived and taught in Vancouver, British Columbia; Black Mountain, North Carolina; Keene, New Hampshire; and Chicago.

Her academic research focuses on environmental humanities and Victorian British literature, topics on which she has published widely in both academic and popular venues, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Mosaic, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. She is author of the academic monograph Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy. Together with Devin Griffiths (USC), she co-edited both a special issue of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture entitled “Open Ecologies,” whose introductory essay remains an influential manifesto in the field of literary environmental humanities, and the edited volume After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press). She is the co-founder of Vcologies, an international consoritium of nineteenth-century humanities scholars working on environmental topics, and currently acts as the group’s treasurer.

For the past four years she has published a Substack newsletter of humorous personal essays entitled “Doctor Waffle” (she is inordinately fond of breakfast foods), and for two years was a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. She also hosts the podcast “Doctor Waffle & Friends,” which features readings of personal essays followed by wide-ranging conversations with their authors.