John Sitter, the Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature, teaches in the Department of English and the Sustainability Minor here at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century poetry, and his current research centers on the relation of major eighteenth-century writers to contemporary cultural issues of sustainability.

Professor Sitter is author of The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arguments of Augustan Wit, and The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry and two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Recent work includes a chapter on poetry from 1740 to 1790 for the revised Cambridge History of English Literature, a chapter on the “poetry of melancholy” for the Blackwell Companion to British Literature, and articles on Samuel Johnson, “Academic Responsibility and the Climate of Posterity,” and “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology.”