John Sitter, Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame, presents on his research project, "Sustaining Literature: Swift, Pope, and Johnson in Our Climate," to an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and scientists comprised of fellows, guest faculty and students. Professor Sitter teaches in the Department of English and the Sustainability Minor at Notre Dame, specializing 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.”