I received my Ph. D. in English from the University of Connecticut in 1993 and have been teaching American Literature to graudate and undregraduate students at Western Washington University. As my Ph. D. dissertation was on Henry David Thoreau's geographical imagination, my interest in literature became more and more of an interdisciplinary pursuit. In 1997, I participated in the N.E.H. (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Seminar on environmental imagination hosted by Vassar College, New York, where I joined twenty five leading scholars in the brugeoning new field of environmental literature and eco-criticism. I've published several articles on Henry David Thoreau and other major American authors. In 2009, I participated in the international conference on ecopoetics held in Brussels and delivered a paper,"A Poetics of a Secretary of Nature: Ezra Pound’s Etymological Reading of Chinese Characters as a Poetic Site for the Reunification of Culture and Nature." The paper was later published in a refereed international journal: "The Journal of Comparative American Studies." I just finished translating four hundred poems from Tang Dynasty and am writing translator's notes to each of the poets selected. My translation is based on a careful review of over fifty thousand poems from the Tang Dynasty and a selection of four hundred poems that focus on the concerns of the non-human environment and the sustainability.
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