Seth Swanner

Assistant Professor for the Department of English

Hoyt Hall 240, sswanner@uwyo.edu

Biography

Seth Swanner joined UW in 2019 as a Lecturer in the LeaRN Program, where he focused on curricula and mentorship opportunities for first-generation college students. In 2023, he joined the English department as Assistant Professor of early modern literature. His research interests include seventeenth-century politics, ecocriticism, critical bibliography, and early modern religion. His current book project, Fringe Natures: Political Upheaval and the Early Modern Environment, explores the intersection between ideas of nature and fringe political categories such as tyranny, treason, and anarchy. The book contents that, as with our current moment, the seventeenth-century witnessed political and environmental ruptures that changed the way literature processed governance, nature, and the junctions between.

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University

M.A., University of Alabama

B.A., Birmingham-Southern College

Recent and Upcoming Courses

Studies in Renaissance Literature: The Pen and the Sword

Literature in English I

Introduction to English Studies

First-Year Seminar: Dark and Stormy

Selected Publications / Awards

Swanner, Seth. “How to Do Things with Birds: The Radical Politics of Nature’s Speech-Acts in Macbeth.” In Reading the Natural World, ed. Tom Willard (Turnhout: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020), 209-227.

Swanner, Seth. “‘The devil that rules i’th’air’: Determinisms of Wind, Star, and State in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” English Literary History (2019), 865-893.

Swanner, Seth. “The Beauty of Ho(me)liness: The Unhandsome Sacramentality of Almost-Shape Poems in George Herbert’s The Temple.” Studies in Philology (2018), 554-579.

College of Arts and Sciences Extraordinary Merit in Teaching Award

Promoting Intellectual Engagement (PIE) Award