University of Missouri-Kansas city

James McKusick joined the UMKC English Department in 2015 as a specialist in British and European Romanticism. He serves as a member of the Graduate Faculty in English. His research and teaching interests include British literature of the 18^th- and 19^th-centuries, literary theory, environmental studies, science fiction, and the history of science.

Over the last two decades, McKusick’s scholarly work has pioneered the development of a new kind of literary criticism, known as ecocriticism. This interdisciplinary approach to the study of British and American literature seeks to uncover the intellectual roots of the modern environmental movement in the poetics of nature in earlier periods. In his book, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology, McKusick contends that the English Romantic poets created a new, holistic way of perceiving the natural world, an essentially ecological understanding of nature, which profoundly influenced the later history of science and culture.

McKusick is the author of two scholarly monographs: Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000; second edition 2010) and Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (1986). He is co-editor of Faustus: From the German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2007) and Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing (2001).

McKusick serves as President of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association and Executive Director of the John Clare Society of North America. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Edgar Snow Memorial Foundation. McKusick has frequently served as an external reviewer for honors programs and colleges at public universities throughout the U.S. Over the last decade, he served as a visiting reviewer and consultant for honors programs in Idaho, Ohio, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Texas and Wyoming.

McKusick has extensive experience as a university administrator, having formerly served as Dean of the UMKC Honors College (2015-2021). Before coming to UMKC, he was a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (1984-2005), where he served as Chair of the English Department (1998-2002) and Director of the Honors College (2002-2005). He also served as Dean of the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana (2005-2015).

British Literature of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods; British Literature of the Eighteenth Century; Science Fiction; Intermediate Academic Prose

Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, Yale University
M.A. and M.Phil. in English Language and Literature, Yale University
B.A. in English and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College