Seth Reno Bio

Seth T. Reno is Associate Professor of English, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, ecocriticism, affect theory, climate fiction, and the environmental humanities. He regularly teaches classes in these areas, as well as literature surveys and writing courses. Seth hails from Ohio, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (that definite article is important!). Before joining AUM in 2013, he taught at Wittenberg University, Ohio State, and Columbus State Community College. He is author of Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (Liverpool University Press, 2019); editor of The Anthropocene: Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021) and Romanticism and Affect Studies (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2018); co-editor (with Allison Hamilton) of William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (COVE, 2022); and co-editor (with Lisa Ottum) of Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century (University of New Hampshire Press, 2016). He has also published dozens journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews.

Dr. Reno is currently working on an anthology of lesser-known industrial writers, titled Popular British Industrial Writings: A Critical Anthology. It contains hundreds of relatively unknown (and often unpublished) poems, essays, and other forms of writing that chronicle the British Industrial Revolution. He has received over $20,000 in grants to fund this project and to hire AUM students to work as part of the editorial team.

In addition to literature, Dr. Reno has a passion for food and travel: he loves cooking, he teaches courses on food and culture, he has undertaken several domestic and international research trips and study abroad courses, and he once came in fourth place at a burger-eating competition (he has since given up his professional food-eating aspirations).