Dr. William Stroup

William Stroup has taught in the English Department at Keene State College since 2000. He teaches a range of courses, including his area of scholarly focus in the British Romantic period, as well as Victorian literature and a broadly comparative approach to traditions of environmental literature from the ancient world to our contemporary climate crisis. He grew up in Lansing, Michigan where he learned from excellent teachers in the public schools, then went to the University of Michigan where he fell in love with contemporary poetry. Reading the writers who inspired his new favorites led him back to the Romantic period, and the teaching and study of the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Jane Austen, and John Keats have been a continuous thread in his teaching and scholarship. His PhD is from the University of New Hampshire, and his most recent published work includes essays that connect literature and visual arts in the volume Wordsworth and the Green Romantics (UPNE, 2016) and Romanticism and Childhood in the volume Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830 (Lexington, 2016). He is an active member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment as well as scholarly groups dedicated to the study of Romantic literature, and regularly serves as a judge in “Poetry Out Loud” competitions. In the Keene community he serves as a Thayer Trustee of the Keene Public Library, as the College’s liaison to the Horatio Colony House Museum and Nature Preserve, and with his family is a dedicated member of the “Salamander Crossing Brigades” organized by the Harris Center each spring to help breeding amphibians whose site fidelity to vernal pools takes them across new and busy roads.