More than half of the IRH cohort each year is made up of fellows from the Universities of Wisconsin. That’s right—not just the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but fellows from the other 12 schools in the system. These are the Universities of Wisconsin Fellows (formerly ‘UW System Fellows’), up to four of whom join the IRH each year. Though some Universities of Wisconsin Fellows move to Madison for the year, most elect to drive to campus multiple days per week during the semester of their fellowship, where they attend Monday seminars and Thursday Humani-teas and work from their offices. Commuting this often is a substantial commitment. But for Stewart Cole (Assistant Professor of English and Environmental Studies, UW-Oshkosh) the drive was worth it.
Multiple days a week for an entire semester, Stewart made the approximately 100-minute drive from Oshkosh to Madison. Once on campus, he was determined to make every minute count. “The time I’ve spent in my office at the IRH has been incredibly productive. I’ve been on a chapter-a-month pace, just as I hoped,” Stewart said, summarizing his fall semester. Though clearly self-motivated, Stewart’s productivity was certainly bolstered by the work ethic of his peers and the conversations he shared with them. “Having that space set aside just for writing and knowing that I’m surrounded by all these wonderful scholars working away at their fascinating projects has been very motivating and focusing. And having the weekly seminars as a kind of anchor point every Monday afternoon—along with the great informal conversations I’ve had with so many people in the IRH community—has provided just the right amount of sociality and intellectual inspiration that the solitary writing process hasn’t become isolating or stultifying in any way.”
So, what, exactly, was Stewart so hard at work on in the fall? His latest book project:The Haunted and the Hunted: Human and Nonhuman Animals in British Literature between the Wars. In it, Stewart argues that the First World War had a profound impact on how those who lived in its wake saw themselves in relation to their own status as animals, and that this impact can be traced through the British literature of the 1920s and 30s. More broadly, the project brings out how the increased cultural awareness of human animality as registered in interwar literature produced ways of representing our relationship to the nonhuman world that we can still learn from today.
Much of Stewart’s research sits at the crossroads of modern literature and animal studies. Though his interest in the former emerged later in life, he’s always had a deep care for animals, so much so that as a child, he dreamt of becoming a zoologist. Then came high school, where he discovered an affinity for literary studies and creative writing (as we’ll get to soon, Stewart is also a poet). But Stewart’s personal appreciation for animals—and political and moral concerns, more generally—continue to guide his scholarly work. “I think the hierarchical thinking at the root of the anthropocentric worldview—the need to ratify ourselves as superior beings—is in some ways inextricable from many other forms of toxically hierarchical thinking that permeate our societies,” he explains. “And so in working to call into question that superiority complex (or, really, set of complexes), I allow myself to hope that I’m doing something meaningful in the service of ecological and social justice.”
The skeptical reader may wonder: Do novels really have this sort of practical significance? In Stewart’s view, to answer in the negative would be to underestimate the power of fiction. “The stories we tell ourselves about the nonhuman world—about what ‘nature’ is, for example, and how humans relate to it—will strongly inform our behavior in relation to that world,” he reasons. For example, take Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). “Each of these books, when read closely from an ecocritical perspective, has profound things to teach us about how our exploitative behaviors towards the nonhuman world are often inextricable from other oppressive phenomena like patriarchy, coloniality, [and] rampant positivism,” Stewart explains. At the same time, and perhaps more optimistically, he suggests that novels like these “afford us glimpses of alternative ways of relating to nonhuman animals, our own animality, nature more broadly, and each other.”
Many of the themes discussed so far—namely, the relationship between literature and sustainability—make its way into Stewart’s lessons at UW–Oshkosh. Boasting an impressive 4.7/5 on the popular website Rate My Professor, Stewart teaches courses ranging from Introduction to Environmental Studies to Utopian/Dystopian Literature at his Universities of Wisconsin campus. As much time as Stewart puts into his own research, he remains just as dedicated to teaching. In terms of style, Stewart prefers creating dialogue over delivering lectures, noting that he takes his students seriously as collaborators and co-creators of knowledge. “Put simply, my teaching begins with asking questions, rather than making statements,” he tells us. What I value most about teaching is that I learn as much from my students as they do from me. The classroom can be such a generative, inspiring space.”
Somehow, in between research and a hefty teaching load, Stewart continues to work on his own poetry. His collections Questions in Bed (2012) and Soft Power (2019) have been published by Goose Lane Editions, Canada’s oldest independent publisher, and his third manuscript, Speck, is nearing completion. Thematically, nothing is off limits in Stewart’s creative works—his poems are highly exploratory, and intentionally so. “I did a reading recently, and someone said to me afterwards that they loved how vividly my work communicates the process of me thinking,” Stewart recalls. “That was a really nice compliment because that’s often what I’m going for—a sense of the processual, a sense of experience as a procession of transient stimuli to which the poetic voice responds.”
Though he is back in Oshkosh for the spring semester, Stewart will continue to trek down to Madison each Monday for IRH seminars. This news was met with great enthusiasm from both IRH staff and fellows. No matter how disconnected the seminar topic is from Stewart’s own expertise, he never fails to offer an incredibly insightful, constructive question during Q&A periods. He has been exactly the sort of collegial, dedicated fellow that the IRH strives to host.