Greetings, Honors students! I'm Dan Philippon, Associate Professor of English, and I'm happy to be serving as one of the inaugural faculty fellows in fall 2023. I've been at the University of Minnesota for 25 years — a quarter-century! — which, when I put it like that, makes me sound old. But my "perceived age" is around 12, which basically means I like playing with ideas as much as I liked playing outside as a kid. Not surprisingly, many of the ideas that interest me still concern the outdoors, or what we now tend to call "the environment."
I teach a range of courses on the environmental humanities, literary nonfiction writing, and sustainability studies, and most of my scholarship examines how writers represent and construct our ideas about nature, place, and, especially lately, food.
Three of my proudest achievements have been helping to co-organize the University’s Environmental Humanities Initiative in 2016, receiving the Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education in 2017, and receiving the Arthur “Red” and Helene B. Motley Exemplary Teaching Award in 2022. I am also a Past President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and I have been a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Turin and University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, and a Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. As a native New Yorker and former resident of the East Coast, I know what it is like to be an immigrant to the Midwest, with all of its strange traditions and vocabulary (ope lemme just sneak right past ya there...), so I look forward to meeting and getting to know as many of you as possible, native Minnesotans and otherwise, in the weeks and months ahead.