Devin Zuber

Devin Zuber teaches as an associate professor in the Department for Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California. He received his PhD, MA, and MPhil in Literature and American Studies from the City University of New York (CUNY) and, prior to moving to Berkeley, he taught American Studies at the University of Osnabrück. Currently on sabbatical from the GTU, he has spent the 2015–2016 year as a visiting research professor in Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture, and as a fellow at the Ingmar Bergman Estate on Fårö Island in the Baltic. His current book, A Language of Things (University of Virginia Press, 2017) explores the dynamics between religious ideology and environmental aesthetics in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American nature writing. While at the Carson Center, he will be completing a related project on the landscape paintings of artist William Keith (1838–1911) that became instrumental for the visual iconography and early advocacy efforts of the Sierra Club.

RCC Research Project: Transforming the Wilderness: Painting the Case of Hetch Hetchy

Selected publications:

• A Language of Things: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination. Monograph in Studies in Religion and Culture series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. 
  
• Death is Waking Up: A Conversation with Marina Abramović. Monograph featuring an in-depth interview with the performance artist, including an introductory critical essay. London: Bookworks/ Swedenborg Society, 2016.
• “The Reservation Paints Back: Native American Aesthetics, Law, and Imagetext.” In Law and Culture: Methods, Concepts, Approaches, edited by Peter Schneck and Sabine Meyer. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2016.
• “9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don DeLillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction.” In Radical Planes? Refiguring Crisis and Continuity in Post-9/11 Literature, edited by Dunja Mohr and Birgit Däwes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2016.
• “‘Radical Correspondence’: Emerson, Swedenborg, and Environmental Poetics.” In Emanuel Swedenborg: Exploring a World Memory, edited by Karl Grandin. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2013.
• “Imagination, Beauty, and the Urban-Land Ethic: Teaching Environmental Literature in New York City.” In Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature in New York, edited by John Waldman. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.