Jim Warren
Professor of English
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450
(540)458-8761
FAX: (540) 458-8708
warrenj@wlu.edu
Office Hours:
M-F 11-12 (Payne 25)
Afternoons by appointment
I have been teaching at Washington and Lee University for 23
years now, since Fall 1984. I came from a luxury two-year
teaching position at the University of Geneva in Switzerland,
jumped into the life of teaching at a small liberal arts college
(all men in 1984), and find myself now fifty-three years
old, past chair of the English Department, teaching nineteenth-century
American Romanticism, the nineteenth-century American novel,
literary theory, literature and the environment. I have
provided links below to some of my sample syllabi. My vita lists
publications, which range somewhat but focus clearly on Walt
Whitman and the transcendentalists. Chapters in my second
book move out from that focus to discuss Frederick Douglass and
William Gilmore Simms. I recently finished a third
book, which focuses on nature writing between the Civil War and
World War One. The central figure in that book is John
Burroughs, the most prolific and popular nature writer in the
United States during the period. Burroughs is best known as
a "disciple" of Whitman, but my research suggests that
this is a gross oversimplification. The book also discusses the work of
John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.
My current research is an
edition of the poems of Mary Austin. I also plan to work on the fiction of
Barry Lopez in the future.
Sample Syllabi:
Wilderness in American
Literature
Topics in Environmental
Literature
Work in Progress:
Mary Austin and
the Road to the Spring
Curriculum Vitae
James Perrin Warren
Return to English Department
Faculty list.