Dr. Brian Yothers
I am the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English. I served as Chair of the Department of English from 2019-2022, Associate Chair from 2014-2019, and Director of Literature and Director of Graduate Studies from 2010-2014. My research specialties are early and nineteenth-century American literature, religion and literature, the literature of travel, poetry, and the literature of slavery and abolition. In 2014, I was a recipient of the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and I am a member of the UTEP Academy of Distinguished Teachers. I am the author of The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876 (2007), Melville's Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America's Most Elusive Author (2011), Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville’s Career (2015), and Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (2016). I have also edited several volumes: Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion (2017), with Jonathan A. Cook; Billy Budd, Sailor: Critical Insights (2017); The Scarlet Letter: Critical Insights (2018), Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies (2018), with Harold K. Bush, The Long Journey: Exploring Travel and Travel Writing (2020), with Maria Pia di Bella, and the Broadview Editions of The Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville (2018), and Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville (2019). I presently serve as Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Co-Editor of the travel section of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), and Associate Editor of Melville's Marginalia Online. I am the Editor of the Camden House Press series Literary Criticism in Perspective, and I served for over a decade as the Co-Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Journeys. I am also the author of more than sixty published and forthcoming scholarly journal articles and book chapters dealing with such topics as Melville's biblical marginalia, Melville’s poetry, Poe's poetry and fiction, literary connections between South Asia and the Americas, and the literary cultures of nineteenth-century American missionaries. Since January, 2018, I have served as Principal Investigator for a $2.04 million combined grant that UTEP and El Paso Community College received from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to support the foundation of The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP. This grant was renewed in 2022 for an additional $2.3 million combined award to EPCC and UTEP. More information is available in my digital portfolio.
UTEP Faculty Profile
Representative Articles and Book Chapters
“Going to Sea in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Decentered Humanism and Poetic Ecology.” Lyrical Ecologies, a special issue edited by Marta Werner and Eliza Richards. DEA-2: Dickinson Electronic Archive, 2017.
“Indo-American Encounters in Melville and Thoreau: Philosophy, Commerce, and Religious Dialogue.” In India in the American Imaginary, 1780s-1880s, edited by Rajender Kaur and Anupama Arora. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 111-140.
“Chesnutt’s Families: Teaching ‘The Sheriff’s Children’ and The Marrow of Tradition in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands.” In Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig, Modern Language Association, 2017, pp. 147-51.
“Poetic Voices.” Humanities Texas Newsletter. April 2017.
“Melville’s Reconstructions: “The Swamp Angel,” “ ‘Formerly a Slave,’” and the Moorish Maid in ‘Lee in the Capitol.’” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies vol. 17, no. 3, 2015, pp. 63-78.