Bryan B Rasmussen, Ph.D.

Professor of English

he/his

Office Hours: Email me at brasmuss@callutheran.edu to schedule an appointment

About

I am Professor of English and faculty in Environmental Studies. My principle areas of research and teaching are in environmental humanities and academic research writing.

My courses take a strong environmental justice approach. In Environmental Literature, Literature of Climate Change, and Literature of California, we foreground the experiences and vulnerabilities of marginalized communities in a variety of environmental contexts, from wilderness, to cities, to the wildland-urban interface. My first-year English 111 Critical Reading and Writing course theme is “The Nature of the City.” (Click here for a 111-student-led virtual tour of some of the issues facing communities along the Los Angeles River.)

As a teacher, I prioritize student learning and experience through a lens of equity and inclusion. I am passionate about creating culturally inclusive curriculum that reflects the experiences and backgrounds of CLU students. As a first-generation college student from a low-income household, I felt underprepared for college. With the help of CLU’s Title V initiatives like CHESS (Collaborative for Hispanics in Higher Education and Student Success), I am learning to use personal experience to help my students navigate and succeed in the sometimes unfamiliar academic world.

My research explores environmental storytelling in ecologically critical places. Building on poet and ecocritic Camille Dungy’s notion of the “conflict zone,” I define ecologically critical places as places of high conservation value where human and nonhuman communities of life collide and become acutely vulnerable to one another. My place-based research projects include the Sierra San Pedro Mártir National Park in Baja California, the Simi Hills, and the Los Angeles River. I have essays and reviews forthcoming or published in Landscape Research, Journal of the Southwest, English Literary History, Victorian Studies, Boom California, and BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I attended community college before transferring to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where I majored in English and Philosophy. I received a PhD from Indiana University in 2008, where I received the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship in Religion and Ethics to complete my dissertation on literature by 19th-century women writer-activists engaged in social justice work in factory, health, and prison reforms on behalf of the urban poor.

I am a certified California Naturalist and volunteer educator for Friends of the Los Angeles River. I like to take photos. See some on Instagram @oxbornbee.

Education

Ph.D. Indiana University, Bloomington

Expertise

Environmental humanities; literature and environment; climate change and literature; California literature; California natural history; Charles Darwin; nineteenth-century British literary and cultural history

Publications

Articles:

Forthcoming, with Andrew W. Pattison: "Condors over Cattle: Managed Wilderness and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Baja California." Journal of the Southwest.
"(Un)Making a Conservation Landscape: Repeat Photography and Environmental Narrative in Mexico's Sierra San Pedro Mártir National Park." Landscape Research, 2024. pp. 1-21.
"Angling in the Anthropocene: Fly Fishing for Carp and the Making of Race on the Los Angeles River." Rewilding the Urban Frontier: Rivers of the Anthropocene. Ed. Greg Gordon. U Nebraska Press. 2024.
"Technologies of Nature: The Natural History Diorama and the Preserve of Environmental Consciousness." Victorian Studies 60.2 (Spring 2018): 255-68.
"Pokémon Go, an Unnatural History: Reflections on race, privilege, and access to augmented nature ." Boom: A Journal of California. Web. June 22, 2017.
"Invertebrate Psychology before and after Darwin." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. 2017.
"From God's Work to Fieldwork: Charlotte Tonna's Evangelical Autoethnography." ELH 77.1 (Spring 2010): 159-94.

Reviews:

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History. Ed. Barbara Larson and Sabine Flach. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Victorian Studies 57.3 (Spring 2015): 535-37.
Anne Isba, The Excellent Mrs. Fry: Unlikely Heroine. Continuum, 2010. Victorian Studies 54.1 (Autumn 2011): 153-55.
Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 53 (Feb. 2009). URL: www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n53/029912ar.html.

Media + Public Scholarship:

Mexican Bird Resurvey Project, collaborator: Contributed expedition journal, science history, and photography to the Moore Lab of Zoology's NSF-funded resurvey of Mexican bird biodiversity in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir region of northern Baja California, Mexico. 2017-2018. URL: https://mexicanbirdresurvey.org/category/baja-journal/?order=asc
"The Harmony of Nature," segment on natural history dioramas and American wilderness ideals for Backstory American history podcast. 38:00-51:00. November 2018. URL: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/stuffed
"Inside the Minds of Animals." TED-Ed. July 2015. URL: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/inside-the-minds-of-animals-bryan-b-rasmussen

Grant Funding

2019. Hewlett Research Grant, American Society for Literature and Environment conference, UC Davis, for a paper in the panel "Anthropocene Wilderness," $1000

2017. Hewlett Research Grant, Archival study and repeat photography of the Sierra San Pedro Martir, Baja, Mexico, $1000

2015. Hewlett Research Grant, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley, Lower California (Baja) archival expedition research, $500

2013. Faculty Research & Creative Works Grant, History of European science museums, $4000

2012. Community Leaders Association, "Small Creatures Sanctuary" apiary. $2025