{"id":2,"date":"2013-08-31T04:22:55","date_gmt":"2013-08-31T04:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2016-10-21T16:26:32","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T16:26:32","slug":"biograph","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/biograph\/","title":{"rendered":"Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1977 and lived with my parents in a very small house on Birch Street.\u00a0 Two months before my third birthday, I moved into a residence hall at the University of Wisconsin \u2013 Eau Claire.\u00a0\u00a0 My father took a job as the hall director at Bridgeman Hall, then a notorious all-male party dorm, lasted one year, and then moved our family into the much more tame Governors\u2019 Hall.\u00a0 According to one hard-hitting piece in the UW-Eau Claire Spectator<\/i>, \u201cSome Governors\u2019 [Hall] residents fe[lt] dorm life ha[d] a negative impact on [me].\u00a0 One resident, Kerry Lowery, said \u2018dorm students hardly ever get to see little kids and it\u2019s a novelty.\u00a0 He gets too much attention.\u2019\u201d Another resident, Sharon Stone (I promise, I\u2019m not making this up), expressed concern that I was \u201cexposed to too much drinking and bad language.\u201d [1]<\/a>\u00a0 While I have few recollections of drinking and swearing, I do have fond memories of eating in the dining hall, of skating on the campus hockey rink, and of playing baseball with my dad in the lawn behind the dorm where a really long home run might roll all the way to lower campus. \u00a0My mom thinks that my career at a UW-system school was predetermined by this childhood.<\/h4>\n

My family and I moved to Waunakee, Wisconsin just before I started first grade and I lived there until I graduated from high school in 1996.\u00a0 Like so many farming communities on the edges of cities, Waunakee has changed dramatically.\u00a0 When we moved to town, the screen door of my parents\u2019 duplex opened to vacant lots of tall grass, and then beyond to cornfields and woods. \u00a0The lots began to quickly fill up with tract houses, but to my eight- or nine-year-old self, this was cause neither for meditation on the crushing inevitability of suburban sprawl, nor on the tragedy of soulless architectural design, nor even on melancholy of \u00a0lost bird habitat.\u00a0 Instead, the unlocked and unguarded house frames and their dumpsters were resources my friends and I exploited for climbing and for lumber for our own building projects.<\/h4>\n

I didn\u2019t really like high school, but I did enough work in my classes to do well in the classes I liked and to get by in the classes I didn\u2019t. \u00a0I found success in history and I admired my U.S. history teacher, Charlie Fuller, so I declared myself a social studies education major when I went to college at Taylor University, a small, religious, liberal arts college in Indiana. \u00a0I spent the fall semester of my sophomore year in Jerusalem, and the experience was a turning point in my life intellectually and academically. Travel through the Middle East (throughout Israel and Palestine, to Jordan, and to Egypt) introduced me to an enormous world of cultural, religious, and gustatory experiences.\u00a0\u00a0 I also met kind, generous, and hospitable people who did not fit easily into the categories of rock-thrower or bulldozer-driver I had formed by watching tv or by flipping through my world history textbooks.<\/h4>\n

I graduated in 2000 with a BS in Social Studies Education with primary specialization in U.S. history and secondary specializations in world history and geography. \u00a0\u00a0After graduating, I taught history for four years at a private high school in suburban Chicago and then English for two years just outside of Seattle.\u00a0 While I was teaching high school history, I realized that I wanted to go to grad school in English, so I began taking undergraduate courses in the evenings and during summer breaks.\u00a0 In the fall of 2006, I moved back to the Midwest to start a graduate program in English at the University of Minnesota.\u00a0 I went into graduate school thinking I wanted to be a scholar of Renaissance drama (my application essay argued that Marlowe\u2019s Doctor Faustus was a reductio ad absurdum critique of William Perkins\u2019s harsh Calvinism) and left a scholar of nineteenth century American literature.\u00a0 My dissertation is called \u201cModern American Pilgrims;\u201d \u00a0it argues that Herman Melville and T.S. Eliot responded to the destruction of their childhood homes by going on pilgrimages to the Holy Land and through England.<\/h4>\n

I started teaching at UW-Whitewater in the fall of 2012.\u00a0 I teach both semesters of freshman English as well as courses in environmental literature and American literature. \u00a0 \u00a0My current research project wends all the way back to my time in Jerusalem as an undergraduate and considers how nineteenth-century literary depictions of the environment of Holy Land affect twenty-first-century political and environmental challenges. \u00a0I am hopeful that the project might contribute to a recovery of erased and forgotten testimonies about the environment of the Holy Land and that it might help provide a way to rethink its former and current inhabitants\u2019 relation to the land.\u00a0 I also hope that a more nuanced reckoning with the historical landscape might provide a way towards a just and durable peace at the same time it encourages a more sustainable relationship to the land.<\/h4>\n

Outside of my work at UWW, I enjoy spending time with my wife and our two children. \u00a0We live in Stoughton and we love exploring our new hometown, \u00a0the Madison farmers’ market, and Wisconsin’s beautiful state parks.<\/h4>\n

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[1]<\/a> Sandberg, Betsy.\u00a0 \u201cBrewer Josh is only 5 – Head resident\u2019s son scores with dormitory life,\u201d Spectator<\/i> [Eau Claire] 9 December, 1982, np. Print.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1977 and lived with my parents in a very small house on Birch Street.\u00a0 Two months before my third birthday, I moved into a residence hall at the University of Wisconsin \u2013 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3878,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3878"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}