Miller Presents Paper Examining Changing Attitudes About Decomposition

Assistant Professor of English John MacNeill Miller presented his paper “Composing Decomposition: In Memoriam and the Ecocritical Undertaking” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) conference in Philadelphia on March 18. The essay uses a close reading of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s elegy In Memoriam to examine how attitudes towards bodily decay have changed over time, arguing that those attitudes affect our ability to understand humanity’s impact on the natural environment.