WKU News

Dr. Tobias Menely, professor of English at UC Davis, will deliver the Warren-Brooks Lecture on Friday (September 15) at Western Kentucky University. The lecture, titled Creation Stories: Reproductive Crisis and the ‘Birth/Abortive’ of Science Fiction, will begin at 3:30 p.m. at Cherry Hall, room 125.

Dr. Menely’s book, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics, was selected as the winner of the 2022 winner of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for outstanding literary scholarship and criticism.

The award, presented each year by the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University, was established by the Warren family to honor an outstanding work of literary scholarship that embodies the spirit, scope, and integrity of the work produced by Warren and his frequent collaborator, Brooks. 

The book award selection committee was deeply impressed with Menely’s innovative use of close reading, a technique that Brooks and Warren advocated through critical texts like Understanding Poetry (1938).

In Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Politics, Menely allows our contemporary experience of climate change to provide insights into how living through the little ice age might have affected the writing of Milton and others, rather than reading the texts merely through a contemporary lens. The book drew on a broad range of critical thought and philosophy and was bookended in a way that gave the argument breadth and depth. Menely’s book was published by the University of Chicago Press.

Contact: Nancy Dinan, rpw.center@wku.edu