Faculty Spotlight: Brian Yothers, Ph.D.

Meet Brian Yothers, Ph.D.! Brian is the English department chair here at SLU. Before joining our community, he spent 19 years at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he was the PI and founding director of The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP. Brian also served as chair of the English department from 2019-2022 at the University of Texas at El Paso.  

His teaching and research focus on American literature before the 20th century, including Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. On top of this, he serves as the editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies as well as recently co-editing a special 25th anniversary issue of Leviathan on the subject of “Digital Melville” with associate editor Jennifer Greiman. 

Brian published a book this summer called "Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now," which suggests that the poetry of the antislavery movement speaks to our own historical moment. Professor Yothers provided a brief synopsis of the book: 

“The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the 19th-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid-nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.” 

Brian is both thoughtful and intentional about his work, and his passion for English and literature is something to be admired. Great work, Professor Yothers!