Denys Van Renen

Professor

Office: THMH 109B   |    Phone: (308) 865-8717   |    Email: vanrenendw@unk.edu

Denys Van Renen

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Illinois
  • M.A., University of Illinois
  • M.S., Stanford University
  • B.A., B.S., University of Colorado

Areas of Specialization

  • Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature
  • John Milton
  • Cultural Studies
  • Scottish Studies
  • Ecocriticism, Native Studies  

Publications

  • The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 

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Chapters and Articles

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  • "'Fit entertainment': The Coronation Entry in Milton's Paradise Lost." Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 41.2 (2017): 69-88. 
  • “‘A Hollow Moan’: The Contours of the Nonhuman World in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Animals and Humans: Sensibility and Representation, 1650-1820, ed. Katherine Quinsey, Oxford University Press, 2017.
  • “‘The Air We Breathe’: Warfare in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer,” College Literature 43.2 (2016): 397-426. 
  • “‘The Temple of Folly’: Transatlantic ‘Nature,’ Nabobs, and Environmental Degradation in The Woman of Colour (1808),” Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830, ed. Ben Robertson, Lexington Books, 2015. 147-168.
  • “Decomposing the Picturesque and Re-collecting Nature in Dorothy Wordsworth's Scotland,” Journal of Narrative Theory 45.2 (2015): 165-92.
  • "Reimagining Royalism in Aphra Behn’s America,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 53.3 (Summer 2013): 499 - 521.   
  • "Biogeography, Climate, and National Identity in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker,” Philological Quarterly 90.4 (2012): 395 - 424. (Abstract)
  • “Montagu’s Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (2011): 1 - 34.  
  • "A ‘Birthright into a New World’: Representing the Town on Brome’s Stage,” Comparative Drama 45.2 (2011): 35 - 63.   

Affiliations

  • Modern Language Association
  • American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Defoe Society
  • Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society    

Courses Taught

  • ENG 466(UG)/874P(G): Literature of the English Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Spring 2014, Sociability) 
  • ENG 362A: Survey of British and Commonwealth Literature I (Fall 2013, Utopias)
  • ENG 250GS: Introduction to Literature: British Literature (Spring 2013, Scottish Literature, 1750 – 1950)
  • ENG 254GS: Introduction to Literature (Summer 2013, Temptation & Maturation: British Literature from Milton to Joyce) 
  • ENG 101: Introduction to Academic Writing
  • ENG 102: Academic Writing and Research (Spring 2013, Travel Writing)