Professor, English
William Kupinse teaches literature and creative writing from an ecological perspective, exploring the connections between world and word. His courses emphasize how novels, poems, and prose shape our understanding of the environment, with particular attention to the link between imaginative writing and environmental justice activism.
Recent scholarship includes three book chapters in edited collections: “What Plant’s in ‘Prelude’? Colonialism, Gender, and Speculative Botany” (Katherine Mansfield: New Directions, 2022), “Katherine Mansfield and Ecocriticism” (The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, 2020) and “Cold Crystal: The Ecology of Affect in Herbert Read’s The Green Child” (Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, 2018). He is currently working on a book titled Organic Modernism, which explores how early to mid 20th-century writers radically transformed Romantic-era ideas about the relationship between the natural world and the literary imagination, countering reactionary political movements of the time and anticipating contemporary discussions of environmental justice.
Bill’s own poetry focuses on local environmental issues, seeking to raise awareness of the impact of fracked gas (a.k.a. “natural” gas) refining in Tacoma on the climate crisis, public health, and indigenous rights.